Why Literary Devices Matter

60 (1/2021), pp. 19–37 The Polish Journal

DOI: 10.19205/60.21.1 of Aesthetics

Lorraine K.C. Yeung

Abstract

This paper investigates the emotional import of literary devices deployed in fiction.

Reflecting on the often-favored approach in the analytic tradition that locates fictional

characters, events, and narratives as sources of readers’ emotions, I attempt to broaden

the scope of analysis by accounting for how literary devices trigger non-cognitive emo-

tions. I argue that giving more expansive consideration to literary devices by which

authors present content facilitates a better understanding of how fiction engages emotion.

In doing so, I also explore the somatic dimension of reading fiction.

Keywords

Affects, Non-cognitive Emotions, Literary Devices, Fiction, Psycho

Introduction

“Norman stirred, turned, and then fell into a darkness deeper and more

engulfing than the swamp.” Thus ends Chapter 5 of Robert Bloch’s Psycho,

in which Norman has a bad dream about Mother after he buries Mary. Upon

reading the chapter, I felt a strange sense of fatigue: my body felt weighed

down, and my breathing became heavier. The experience of bodily feelings

such as these when engaging with literary fiction is not uncommon. Verily,

people often notice that literary fiction can evoke bodily responses in them.

For example, Susan Feagin (2010) remarks that the line “So it goes” in Kurt

Vonnegut’s work of science fiction Slaughterhouse-five caused her to shiver.

Contemporary critics of horror often comment that a work of literary horror

“makes your flesh creep” or “sends chills down your spine.”

Hong Kong Baptist University

College of International Education

Email: lorraine@hkbu.edu.hk

20 L o r r a i n e K. C. Y e u n g

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

However, how does reading fiction in silence, a “rather bodiless activity,”

stir readers somatically? An intuitive explanatory answer is through emo-

tion. As for how a work engages readers’ emotions, an approach often fa-

vored by analytical philosophy turns to the plot and narrative, and fictional

characters and events, for an explanation while leaving literary devices and

stylistic elements underinvestigated. In other words, this approach tends

to foreground content independent of how the content is presented, i.e.,

the style of a work.

I call this the “content-based approach.” The approach

makes sense to the extent that fiction, as Nick Zangwill sees it, “involves con-

tent first and foremost” (cited in Kivy 2011, 37). Zangwill’s claim is true,

especially for philosophers who take literary fiction as a vehicle for philo-

sophical themes or ethical inquiry.

What merits more philosophical interest

is, therefore, the propositional content. A related view motivating this ap-

proach is that our emotional responses to a work are products of proposi-

tional, cognitive states—be they “fictional truths,” “thought-content,” or “per-

ceptual beliefs”—that the reader can garner from the work’s content. This

paper intends to make a case for the inclusion of literary devices as a proper

object of study in the analytic framework of fiction and emotion. I first take

a brief critical look at a content-based approach, namely, Noël Carroll’s

criterial prefocusing model, which accounts for how fiction engages emo-

tions. After showing its limitations, I turn to an alternative model proposed

by Jenefer Robinson (2005). Based on Robinson’s model, I account for how

literary devices deployed in fiction trigger non-cognitive emotion and con-

tribute to our emotional engagement. I flesh out my account using passages

taken from The Reef and Psycho.

1. A Content-Based Approach

Carroll’s criterial prefocusing model leans toward cognitive emotions.

The cognitive theory of emotion—in which a propositional, cognitive state is

necessary for emotion—informed his choice of focus. Despite his recent con-

cession that emotions are more often non-cognitive, affective responses,

Some examples of philosophers who lean towards this approach are Kendall Walton

(1990) in his Mimesis as Make-Believe, Martha Nussbaum (1995), and Noël Carroll, whose

works will be discussed shortly.

For example Nussbaum (1992, 23-29) approaches literary texts as indispensable

components in ethical inquiry. Carroll’s (2001) clarification view also purports that narra-

tive fiction can clarify our moral understanding and emotions.

W h y L i t e r a r y D e v i c e s M a t t e r 21

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

he insists that our emotional responses to literature are cognitive because

“they must be engaged imaginatively and understood” and “they are not

reducible to perceptual responses” (2020, 9).

Carroll (2001) explains that cognitive emotions occur when cognition

subsumes an event or object under a specific criterion or category. For ex-

ample, anger occurs when one’s cognition subsumes an event in the category

of a “wrong done to me or mine,” which is a criterion appropriate to the emo-

tion anger. Similarly, in reading fiction, cognitive emotion occurs when read-

ers subsume fictional events under a specific category. One of his favorite

illustrative examples is Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which the author confronts

readers with scenes of black families being separated and emphasizes the

innocence and decency of the slaves “whose family ties are being sundered,

and the cruelty and callousness with which it is being done” (2001, 226).

So, the author prompts readers to “perceive the scenes under the category of

injustice,” which elicits in the readers “the affect of indignation” (2001, 226).

Carroll (2020) suggests that emotion directs our attention like a search-

light, scanning the environment for features that are subsumable under our

reigning emotional state and that are vital to our interests; it “sound[s] bod-

ily alarms that rivet our attention” (10). Meanwhile, unlike everyday situa-

tions in which emotionally pertinent features are selected from a massive

array of largely unstructured stimuli, the details have usually been struc-

tured and made salient by fiction writers. As we have seen, he relies on

a salient description of cruelty to explain how Uncle Tom’s Cabin provokes

readers’ emotions.

We could draw another example from a novel about

a zombie apocalypse, in which the writer may “describe in gory adjectival

excess the suppurating bodies of the zombies, their decay and fragmenta-

tion” to engender the affect of disgust (2020, 11).

One may doubt that salient depiction alone guarantees emotional en-

gagement; salient depictions of battles in a treatise on military tactics, for

instance, have little emotion-inducing capacity. Carroll seems to notice this

problem when he adds another necessary condition; the narratives should

enlist readers’ specific concerns, preferences, or pro-attitudes—any attitudes

in favor of something. They prompt readers to find out if the protagonists in

the previous imagined zombie apocalypse novel survive, or to hope for the

rectification of the wrongs done to the black families in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Nussbaum (1995, 93-97) likewise focuses on how Richard Wright’s Native Son re-

cruits white readers’ sympathy for the black character Bigger Thomas by “drawing atten-

tion to misery”, focusing their attention on the individual, and guiding readers to see the

world—and the disadvantaged situation he is in—through his eyes .

22 L o r r a i n e K. C. Y e u n g

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Still, a problem with this model is that while it may explain how literary

fiction engenders standard, garden-variety emotions, it does not accommo-

date the more complicated, ineffable ones. Carroll’s model quite readily sorts

emotions into nameable categories. Conversely, critics often say that,

for example, Kafka’s works can induce a “sensory reaction” and emotions

“of some sort” in readers, which can be described only through approxima-

tions such as “pain,” “awe,” or “horror.” Robinson (2005) also notes that by

reading a significant literary work like Edith Wharton’s The Reef, some

evoked emotions do not involve subsuming a fictional event under a crite-

rion appropriate to a particular nameable emotion. Admittedly, critics and

readers often do communicate emotions with others in terms of existing

nameable emotions. However, the shades of emotions experienced during

reading can be more subtle, complex, and ambivalent, eluding Carrollian

categorization.

This limitation, I think, results from applying the “criterion of appropri-

ateness” of real-life emotions to fictional emotions. Undeniably, many fic-

tional emotions do follow similar criteria of appropriateness as these every-

day emotions. Nevertheless, writers may also create emotions in a far less

formulaic way than those governed by appropriateness criteria. Carroll is

rather insistent that the criteria for horror are harmfulness and impurity.

However, in literary horror, readers can be horrified by harmless and ordi-

nary objects like the fire hose (Stephen King’s The Shining) or a withering

apple tree (Daphne Du Maurier’s The Apple Tree). At the same time, Carroll

tends to link pro-attitudes and concerns with positive human characters.

However, in Robert Bloch’s Psycho, readers are made to sympathize with

Norman Bates, an unlikeable and charmless serial killer who fails to be

an appropriate object of pro-attitudes and concerns.

Carroll has submitted different defenses to this line of objection. A recent

one is that his criterial prefocusing model is still “the more perspicuous way”

to handle these more complicated emotions (2020, 18). He explains that

one can adopt “reverse engineering”: we may observe that the features of

the situation made salient by the author point in different directions (say,

“joy” and “sadness”), then work backward to a more appropriate and com-

plicated emotion (say, “bittersweet”). Regarding concerns for unlikeable or

evil characters, he opines that “sympathy for the devil” in fiction results from

readers’ shifting moral assessments of the situation (1990, 142-143).

He elsewhere (2013) attributes viewers’ tendency to ally with the fictional

mobster-boss Tony Soprano to the moral structure of the fictional world,

W h y L i t e r a r y D e v i c e s M a t t e r 23

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

in which Tony is the lesser evil and thus the best candidate for the alliance.

As such, his approach to more complicated emotions still leans towards cog-

nitive emotions that have their source in the content.

Even so, his model receives other criticisms. Robinson (2005) casts doubt

on the mechanism by which Carroll says authors evoke emotions. She notes

that authors evoke readers’ emotions only after their cognition subsumes

fictional characters or events under specific criteria appropriate to emotion

in this model. Robinson retorts that readers can also feel emotionally

engaged before categorizing the fictional characters or events under any

criteria appropriate to an emotion—although the emotions involved could

be “coarse” or “rough” in their initial stages.

To form judgments about the

fictional characters or events, readers often reflect on their emotions after-

ward.

To this objection, Carroll might reply that such categorization does not

have to be a conscious operation, “no more than my recognition that an on-

coming car is potentially harmful need be accompanied by my saying it”

(2001, 27). That is why readers might feel as if they were emotionally en-

gaged before they engaged in any categorization. However, even if we accept

that categorization may operate below the level of consciousness, the rela-

tionship between attention and categorization is still not clear. In this model,

an emotion occurs after the appropriate categorization, yet the categoriza-

tion occurs after the reader’s attention is drawn to certain emotion-relevant

aspects of the fictional character or event. Although Carroll suggests that

those emotion-relevant aspects stand out by salient depiction, I cannot help

wonder: on what grounds does the salient depiction draw the readers’ atten-

tion, with the result that the depiction emotionally prompts the readers to

subsume what they read in the first place? As Robinson also notes, “Although

what our attention is drawn to may be ‘subsumable’ under some emotion

category, we do not actually subsume it under a category until after our at-

tention has been fixed upon it” (2005, 183).

The move of supplementing his model with pro-attitudes, concerns, and

preferred outcomes invested by the narrative does not help for a similar

reason. We can still ask, what makes the narrative so successfully engaging

that the readers are invested with pro-attitudes, concerns, and preferred

outcomes? The same narrative with the same characters can fail to invest

readers with pro-attitudes, et cetera, if an unskillful writer handles it. Per-

haps the readers’ attention has to be drawn to relevant details in the first

place and fixed or sustained to become invested with pro-attitudes and pre-

ferred outcomes that guarantee emotional responses. In other words, while

24 L o r r a i n e K. C. Y e u n g

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Carroll is right that emotion is attention-guiding, his model does not explain

what fixes our initial attention on emotion-relevant details and what drives

the readers’ cognition to subsume what they read emotionally.

2. Robinson’s Model

Robinson (2005) constructs an alternative model to Carroll’s based on the

embodied appraisal theory of emotion. On this theory, an emotional re-

sponse is, paradigmatically, an “(1) automatic bodily response that (2) makes

something salient to the organism (focuses the organism on something), and

(3) what it makes salient or focuses on is something registered as significant

to its well-being” (2003, 241). This conception of emotion coincides with

what psychologists call “quick and dirty feelings” or “affects,” whose function

is to heighten attention and get ready for action. Since emotions are pri-

marily affective, embodied appraisals, a bodily perturbation without cogni-

tive states and below the subject’s conscious awareness can trigger emo-

tions. In other words, as Carroll has also conceded, cognitive states are not

necessary for emotion.

Accordingly, Robinson deems that literary fiction can activate readers’

affective appraisals before any meaningful content for cognitive categoriza-

tion is available to them. A narrative can induce what she calls “coarse or

rough” emotions. They appraise “in a coarse-grained way: this is good/bad,

friend/enemy, strange and threatening/safe and familiar” (2005, 183).

Robinson’s characterization of “coarse or rough” emotions is reminiscent of

the Nietzschean idea of basic affect, which is an inclination or aversion to

what is going on.

The coarse-grained affective appraisal can seize readers’

initial attention, making the emotion-related details of the narrative salient.

Focusing on those details in turns prompts readers to appraise in a “more

fine-grained way” (Robinson 2005, 183), which typically recruits cognitive

assessment of subsequent fictional characters/events, whereby cognitive

emotions towards those fictional characters/events occur. When readers

become emotionally involved in a narrative, both coarse-grained affective

appraisals and the more fine-grained cognitive evaluations provide feedback

to readers, which may configure, sustain, intensify or dissipate an emotion

towards the characters/events as the narrative progresses. So Robinson

remarks that in being emotionally engaged with a sophisticated narrative,

“there is a succession of affective and cognitive appraisals going on all the

See for example Nietzsche (2019), section 34.

W h y L i t e r a r y D e v i c e s M a t t e r 25

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

time” (2005, 183). Although readers may not be conscious of every affective

and cognitive appraisal in the process, if the experience taken as a whole is

rich and intense, it will prompt readers to engage in after-the-fact reflection.

Furthermore, usually, it is when readers reflect on the experience that the

emotions are cataloged.

The merit of Robinson’s model is that it fills in the missing piece in Car-

roll’s model. Recall that Carroll’s model does not explain what makes read-

ers’ attention “emotionally charged” in the first place. Robinson’s model sug-

gests that the quick and dirty, coarse or rough emotions can do the trick.

To word it another way, if a piece of literary fiction engages emotion by, for

example, investing readers with pro-attitudes, concerns, and preferred out-

comes, the emotion is better guaranteed if the text is emotion-laden in the

first place so that the engagement directs the readers’ attention to relevant

details that aim to develop those pro-attitudes, concerns and preferred out-

comes. Readers are then prompted to follow the plot and evaluate the fic-

tional characters/events in a more fine-grained way.

As for how literary fiction can be emotion-laden in a way that grabs read-

ers’ initial attention, rendering it emotionally-charged, one answer may turn

to descriptions of a character’s inner states.

The psychologists Kneepkens

and Zwaan (1994) find that personally-involving details about a character

are one type of emotional, “interesting information,” which takes less effort

and conscious control to attend to and memorize than unemotional (though

important) information. Robinson likewise regards “careful description of

the emotional states of the characters” as a way to engage readers’ emotions,

whereby they are “made to focus attention on certain situations and to see

them in a certain way” (2005, 158). She instances a passage taken from Edith

Wharton’s The Reef:

‘Unexpected obstacle. Please don’t come till thirtieth. Anna.’ All the way from Charing

Cross to Dover the train had hammered the words of the telegram into George Dar-

row’s ears, ringing every change of irony on its commonplace syllables: rattling them

out like a discharge of musketry, letting them, one by one, drip slowly and coldly into

his brain, or shaking, tossing, transposing them like the dice in some game of the gods

of malice; and now, as he emerged from his compartment at the pier, and stood facing

the wind-swept platform and the angry sea beyond, they leapt out at him as if from

the crest of the waves, stung and blinded him with a fresh fury of derision. ‘Unex-

pected obstacle. Please don’t come till thirtieth. Anna.’ (Cited in Robinson 2005, 161).

I opt for a pluralistic approach to fictional emotions, so I am only suggesting that de-

scription of a character’s inner states is just one of a number of effective ways to do this.

26 L o r r a i n e K. C. Y e u n g

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Robinson comments that Wharton realistically describes Darrow’s inner

states induced by the telegram. The passage dramatizes Darrow’s emotional

states regarding his interaction with the environment and relation to the

world but not in terms of his beliefs or cognitive judgments about Anna or

the telegram. The passage features “the sound of the train, the cold unwel-

coming sea, the wet gloomy weather” and the crowd on the pier: “they too

seem to reject him and to be either hostile or indifferent” (2005, 161). These

are the unpleasant qualities in the environment that are made salient in Dar-

row’s perception of it. Also, the passage both begins and ends with the words

in Anna’s telegram. The repetition expresses Darrow’s obsessive focus on the

telegram. To Robinson, this passage is an acceptable illustration of how Dar-

row’s emotional responses unfold in ways that approximate her embodied

appraisal theory of emotion but not the cognitive theory of emotion.

To me, this passage can also serve as an apt illustration of how literary fic-

tion can secure readers’ emotional involvement with a character before any

meaningful content for cognitive categorization is available. Clearly, the pas-

sage describes a somewhat unpleasant situation: Darrow is upset by Anna’s

telegram. However, as this is the novel’s opening passage, readers do not

know anything about Darrow and what happened between him and Anna.

It is not likely that readers have any attitudes towards or concerns about him

or have subsumed the situation emotionally in the way described by Carroll’s

model.

Still, one may notice that on my current reading, the emotion aroused

in readers may be explained by the propositional state “Darrow is upset.”

The analysis remains somewhat content-based. So, questions arise: can the

passage enlist an even coarser-grained emotion than this, one which the

content alone cannot adequately explain? Is Carroll right that our emotions

in response to literary fiction are cognitive after all?

3. Why Literary Devices Matter

My answer to the questions raised is that the passage’s style by which

propositional content is presented plays a role in its emotional impact.

The Reef’s opening passage enlists non-cognitive emotion of negative valence

through its literary devices. The term “literary devices” refers to what Robin-

son calls “verbal form,” i.e., syntactic and rhetorical devices including but not

limited to parallelism, asyndeton, rhyme, rhythm, and imagery (2005, 212-

213), or what Feagin dubs “verbal features,” which encompass “diction, nar-

rative voice, style, sentence structure—in short, anything about the way lan-

W h y L i t e r a r y D e v i c e s M a t t e r 27

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

guage is used in the work” (1996, 132). Robinson contends that literary de-

vices function to guide readers’ emotional responses, focusing attention and

influencing readers’ initial affective appraisals and subsequent cognitive

evaluation of the content. Feagin likewise maintains that verbal features of

language often elicit affective responses. Verbal features can encourage or

heighten feelings such as uneasiness, curiosity, eagerness, et cetera, all of

which facilitate readers’ engagement with a fictional scenario.

Although Robinson illustrates her contention using poems and does not

discuss how literary devices function in The Reef’s opening passage, I do not

see much difficulty extending her claim to the passage. Let us explore the

passage more in-depth in light of her contention by examining its verbal

features. It starts with a contrast: a single, lengthy sentence that expresses

Darrow’s unsettling flux of feelings and perceptions provoked by the words

in Anna’s telegram follows the short and bluntly formal sentences of Anna’s

telegram. The use of a lengthy sentence filled with kinesthetic imagery in-

scribes the processual, on-going shades of feelings and perceptions into this

emotional episode, rendering it a fluctuating motion. By calling the words in

the telegram “commonplace syllables,” it seems that Wharton wants to direct

readers’ attention to the sonic contrast of the subsequent lines, which indeed

feature, for example, a series of adverbial participles (“ringing,” “rattling,”

“shaking,” “tossing,” “transposing”) with trills or fricative sounds. Together

with the choppy phrases and clauses, the lengthy line develops a distinct,

quavering rhythm.

In this way, the passage is apt to enact a rhythmic but mildly strenuous

and bumpy moving experience, and consequently, a mild sense of strain in

readers. The line may also get readers to form in their mind a sequence of

fleeting, visual images of a variety of movements accompanied by jagged

sound imagery, such as a shaking train compartment, discharging musketry,

blowing wind and a roaring sea with waves in motion, however faint and

transient they are. Indeed, words mediate the imagined perceptual states,

but the end-product is more like a collage of images that do not necessarily

form propositional content. I venture that the verbal features breed negative,

non-cognitive emotion that agitates readers, activating their affective under-

standing of Darrow’s inner emotional state. The negative emotion’s sources

go beyond the propositional state “Darrow is upset.” It secures the readers’

initial attention and interest, prompting them to read more about what had

However, Feagin (1996, 78) holds a cognitive theory of emotion and deems that

mere affective responses are not emotions. Following Robinson, my position is that the

affective responses under consideration in this section are emotions. This is not to say,

however, that all responses elicited by verbal features are emotions.

28 L o r r a i n e K. C. Y e u n g

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

happened between Darrow and Anna. It may invest them with the attitude

towards Darrow, even though they know very little about him. Recall Car-

roll’s remark that emotional responses to literature are cognitive, provided

that they must involve imagination and understanding. Conversely, I am try-

ing to characterize here the kind of understanding and imagination as not

necessarily propositional. It involves embodied understanding of movement

on the one hand and sensory (or imagistic) imagination—which is typically

characterized as a non-propositional use of images—on the other.

To experience the passage in this way involves what Mark Johnson calls

“embodied meaning-making.” The “embodied meaning” of a passage is to be

contrasted with its propositional, linguistic meaning; it “goes beyond words”

(2008, 219). Johnson notes that in poetry, various senses, including sight,

hearing, smell, and taste, typically develop the non-propositional embodied

meanings and richly felt qualities; they are dependent on “the precise

rhythm of images, sounds, pauses, and intensifications” (2008, 220) that

constitute the style of a work. These sensory qualities resonate with readers

in different ways, animating parts of readers’ corporeal understanding of the

subject matter and the sensations, feelings, or emotions that the content

expresses.

Johnson states that the non-propositional embodied meanings and richly

felt qualities of poems could often be seen, though admittedly to a lesser

degree, in prose language. In The Stranger, Johnson instances that Camus’s

“almost Hemingway-like conciseness and sparseness,” or what is called Ca-

mus’s impersonal, expository, lucid, flat “white style,”

expresses Meursault’s

indifferent attitude to the world. However, the images, sensations, rhythms,

and pulsations of some passages in the funeral scenes “carry the reader

along by evoking a vast sea of unconscious, or barely conscious, connections

and feelings” (2008, 223), activating readers’ corporeal understanding of

Meursault’s subjective, private experiences of his mother’s funeral. It occurs

to me that in some cases, the impact of the literary devices in prose language

is so perceptible that (sensitive) readers are aware of how their sensory

qualities resonate with their body. The aesthetician Zhu Guangqian observes

that on reading Chinese prose written in a “clanging tone” and “smooth

rhythm,” the muscles all over his soma undergo similarly rhythmic move-

ments of alternating tension and alleviation, rendering in him the feeling of

pleasure; conversely, his muscles feel “constrained and uneasy” when read-

ing prose with inharmonious tones or “flawed” rhythm (1994, 124).

See Landland-Hassen 2016, 64.

See Susan Sontag 2001, 16.

W h y L i t e r a r y D e v i c e s M a t t e r 29

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Perhaps it can be said that some prose language can appeal to readers’

bodies in ways analogical to visual images and music. My surmises do not

sound too fanciful if we consider that literary scholars characterize literary

devices (e.g., imagery, repetitions, rhythm) as means of engaging readers’

bodily sensations (e.g., Steidele 2007; Solander 2013), or how philosophers

in the continental tradition write about prose language’s musicality (e.g.,

Deleuze 1997; Wiskus 2014). Specifically, Deleuze remarks that “there is also

a painting and a music characteristic of writing, like the effects of colors and

sonorities that rise up above words” (Deleuze 1997, Iv).

That being said, I am aware that my account is not without challenges.

In my analysis of Wharton’s passage, one possible source of emotion is the

visual and/or aural images excited by the passage filled with imageries,

yet Peter Kivy would be dismissive of this view. Kivy rejects that silent read-

ing of fiction excites visual and aural images in readers’ minds that are

“no less distinct” than the images experienced as if they were initially eye-

witnesses (2011, 131). These views are, he argues, based on a faulty Lockean

model of language according to which words, “by constant use,” readily excite

“Ideas” that affect the “Senses” (Locke 1975/1964, 261). The “Ideas” are

tokens of the same type as the ideas that would be caused to arise if one saw

the object signified by the words (Kivy 2011, 131). Kivy adduces Edmund

Burke’s remarks that words rarely produce any visual or aural images in

readers’ minds and that a particular effort of the imagination is required for

their occurrence, further suggesting that “our speed of language comprehen-

sion far outstrips our ability to form mental images” (2011, 23). Kivy adds

that even if readers sometimes entertain vivid mental images, they are far

from “talking pictures” that, I take him to mean, carry propositional content.

As a proponent of the cognitive theory of emotion, Kivy expectedly disre-

gards mental images as a legitimate source of emotions.

Before submitting responses to this possible challenge, it should be noted

that Kivy and I subscribe to different theories of emotion. Following Robin-

son’s embodied appraisal theory of emotion on which cognitive states that

carry propositional content are not necessary for an emotion to occur, my

account does not require Kivy’s “talking pictures” for emotion to occur.

What interests me is Burke’s empirical claims, adduced by Kivy, about the

frequency and likelihood of forming mental images in silent reading. I sus-

pect that forming mental images varies with the prose language’s quality and

the readers. It is probably easier to excite visual and aural images in readers,

for example, who grow up in a multi-media environment than those who do

not, for the former are used to learning stories through (and thus have more

30 L o r r a i n e K. C. Y e u n g

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

mental resources connected to) aural and moving visual images. Other lived

experiences (e.g., traveling experiences) are likely additional sources of such

mental resources. It is not to say that the imagistic imagination is a mere

matter of retrieving images from memory. Because our memory is prone to

confabulation and that concurrent emotion can color our state of mind, I am

inclined to say that the imagination is closer to fabrication.

Next, empirical studies seem to show that the phenomenon of forming

mental images while reading is not as unusual as Burke and Kivy think.

Recent findings in psychology (e.g., Speer et al. 2009, Foroni et al. 2009) re-

veal that reading narrative texts often activate brain regions that process

experiences of sights, sounds, tastes, and movements and that verbal, emo-

tional stimuli drive muscle activation. Another pertinent phenomenon is

hearing inner voices during reading, which the activation of the auditory

cortex’s voice-selective areas explains (Yao et al., 2011). In this context, it is

also worth mentioning that recent neuroscientific studies show that imagin-

ing sound has a “measurable effect on areas of the brain directly related to

the perception of sound” (Grimshaw & Garner 2014, 1) and that imaginary

stimuli can generate emotion via the same causal pathway as real stimuli (1).

As already noted, Kivy admits the occasional occurrence of mental im-

ages, though he refuses to see them as a legitimate source of (cognitive) emo-

tion. He also fully acknowledges the phenomenon of hearing inner voices

during silent reading. He nevertheless is reluctant to count these perceptual

experiences as the aesthetic experience of prose fiction. One reason for this

is that readers seldom take the perpetual properties of prose language as

the direct object of artistic attention. Another reason is that the perceptual

experiences are far less significant when compared to those arising from

poetry. The second point, I concede, is true. As a less content-based form of

writing, poetry, in general, relies more heavily on verbal features and sound

quality than on content for their impact. As Schopenhauer once remarked:

“I remember from early childhood that I was delighted for a long time by the

pleasant sounds of verse before I discovered that it made sense and con-

tained thoughts as well” and that “even trivial thoughts gain a measure of

significance through rhythm and rhyme” (2014, 446).

As such, the images are not necessarily “token[s] of the same type” as ideas evoked

by real objects either. In fact, I opine that different readers probably have different ver-

sions of the images. For example, in the image of the discharging musketry that came to

my mind when reading Wharton’s passage, the musket is pointing right; other readers

may imagine it differently.

W h y L i t e r a r y D e v i c e s M a t t e r 31

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

With limited space, I do not wish to enter into the debate with Kivy over

whether the perceptual experiences arising from prose fiction are suffi-

ciently significant to be qualified under his conception of “aesthetic experi-

ence.” Instead, my suggestion is that there seems to be no reason to rule out

that skillful deployment of verbal features in fiction can have a causal power

similar to that identified in poetry by Schopenhauer, albeit to a lesser degree.

I hope my discussion thus far is convincing enough to make a case for it.

It remains probable that even if readers are occupied mainly by the content

and seldom take prose language as the direct object of artistic attention,

as Kivy asserts, their affective appraisals can be simultaneously triggered,

often subliminally, by the verbal features of the passages. Taken together,

even if our emotional responses to fiction are not reducible to non-cognitive,

perceptual responses, as Carroll holds, this does not rule out their occur-

rence. The non-cognitive, affective responses can still be contributory to the

emotional experience. Indeed, in my analysis, Wharton’s passage can enlist

both our cognitive and non-cognitive responses, and both the verbal features

and the content combine to create the passage’s full-blown emotional ef-

fect.

Thus I agree with Feagin (1992) that affective responses to fiction are not

merely mediated by thoughts generated from the content but are often mani-

festations of sensitivities to the style of the work and its verbal features.

This view, Feagin insightfully adds, “provides impetus for the view that there

are special sorts of “aesthetic experiences” offered by literary fiction whose

qualitatively distinctive character is unlike ordinary, everyday experience”

(1996, 135). It also sheds light on how a work configures the more compli-

cated emotions mentioned in section II, say, “sympathy for the devil.” In what

follows, I illustrate my view with the case of Psycho, the novel with which my

paper begins.

As already noted, Bloch’s Psycho manages to get readers to sympathize

with the unlikeable Norman. In the film adaptation, Hitchcock gets viewers

to side with him by detailing Norman’s silent concealment of Mary’s murder,

making the viewers feel “an uncanny profound satisfaction of a job properly

done” (Žižek 2004). In the novel, Bloch did this by spending the whole of

Derek Matravers (1998) similarly argues that the non-propositional properties of

literature matter for a full explanation of our emotional reactions to it. He brings up liter-

ary devices such as tone of voice, imagery, repetition, sibilance, et cetera (91, 97). In this

paper, I go one step further to explore their somatic effects.

That probably explains why the impact of a literary fiction can be weakened by

reading an (unskillful) translated version.

32 L o r r a i n e K. C. Y e u n g

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Chapter 5 (51-63) using alternating verbal features when describing

Norman’s actions and his inner states about concealing Mary’s murder.

For example, on the third page of Chapter 5, Norman ponders,

The girl had driven in alone, said she’d been on the road all day. That meant she

wasn’t visiting en route. And she didn’t seem to know where Fairvale was, didn’t men-

tion any other towns nearby, so the chances were she had no intention of seeing any-

one around here. Whoever expected her—if anyone was expecting her—must live

some distance further North.

Of course this was all supposition, but it seemed logical enough. And he’d have to

take a chance on being right.

She had signed the register, of course, but that meant nothing. If anybody ever

asked, he’d say that she had spent the night and driven on.

All he had to do was get rid of the body and the car and make sure that everything

was cleaned up afterward.

That part would be easy. He knew just how to do it. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but it

wouldn’t be difficult either.

And it would save him from going to the police. It would save Mother.

Oh, he still intended to have things out with her—he wasn’t backing down on that

part of it, not this time—but this could wait until afterward.

The big thing now was to dispose of the evidence. The corpus delicti (53).

From the second paragraph on, this passage stands out for its noticeably

short, consecutive paragraphs, within which the sentences are syntactically

simple, and wordings are straightforward. It can be read with the pleasure

of lucidity. They run as if Norman was thinking aloud to himself (e.g., ‘Oh’).

The passage orders Norman’s flow of thoughts in a distinct “step-by-step”

rhythm, which registers the logical reckoning of Norman’s plan. If the verbal

features are a bit too conspicuous, they mark Norman’s conscious, controlled

effort to structure his thoughts and focus of attention. They qualitatively

mimic Norman’s thought process and encourage readers to follow the

rhythm of Norman’s thoughts, working to “synchronize” the readers’

thoughts with Norman’s. The passage aims to get readers to “think along”

with Norman, despite being guised in the third person mode.

Shortly afterwards Norman resolved in carrying out his plan. He first had to look

for a container for the corpus delicti.

Norman went down to the basement and opened the door of the old fruit cellar.

He found what he was looking for – a discarded clothes hamper with a sprung cover.

It was large enough and it would do nicely.

I am aware that other content-related factors, such as Mary’s death and Norman’s

voyeuristic behavior, can also prompt or hinder a reader’s alliance with Norman.

W h y L i t e r a r y D e v i c e s M a t t e r 33

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Nicely—God, how can you think like that about what you’re proposing to do?

He winced at the realization, and took a deep breath. This was no time to be self-

conscious or self-critical. One had to be practical. Very practical, very careful, very

calm.

Calmly, he tossed his clothes into the hamper. Calmly, he took an old oilcloth from

the table near the cellar stairs. Calmly, he went back upstairs, snapped off the kitchen

light, snapped off the hall light, and let himself out of the house in darkness, carrying

the hamper with the oilcloth on top (54).

This passage contains a brief moment of tension when Norman cogni-

tively monitors his positive reaction to the hamper. It triggers the cognitive

emotions of guilt and shame in him. For readers who still refuse to side with

Norman, this self-reproach works to gain their sympathy.

For readers who

already do so, or who even are slightly delighted by the hamper as Norman

was, Norman’s sudden thought (expressed by the sentence in italics) may

function like a vague alarm that distances them from Norman. Nevertheless,

immediately the tension dissipates as Bloch gets Norman to pull himself

together by the reassuring line ending in diminishing syllables, “Very practi-

cal, very careful, very calm.” The line descends towards the succeeding para-

graph featuring the repetitive use of “Calmly,” in which the use of a similar

form of the sentences’ grammatical construction, parallelism, strikes a sense

of regularity and steadiness in readers. A sense of rhythm recurs, and this

time it registers Norman’s actions. As the sentences become lengthier,

a vague sense of gradual restoration of stability is felt. It ends in a moment of

“ease.” The passage continues,

It was harder to be calm here in the dark. Harder not to think about a hundred and

one things that might go wrong.

Mother had wandered off—where? Was she out on the highway, ready to be

picked up by anyone who might come driving by? Was she still suffering a hysterical

reaction, would the shock of what she had done caused her to blurt out the truth to

whoever came along and found her? Had she run away, or was she merely in a daze?

Maybe she’d gone down past the woods back of the house, along the narrow ten-acre

strip of their land which stretched off into the swamp. Wouldn’t it be better to search

for her first?

Norman sighed and shook his head. He couldn’t afford the risk. […] (54-55).

Self-reproach is a rhetoric strategy for inducing sympathy for problematic charac-

ters. See Wayne Booth’s (1983) The Rhetoric of Fiction. Relieving anxiety is another, which

is also used in this passage.

34 L o r r a i n e K. C. Y e u n g

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Here the instability of Norman’s emotions and wondering thoughts are

inscribed in a lengthier paragraph containing a mixture of structurally dif-

ferent sentences of irregular lengths. Unlike the previous passages, this

paragraph does not course forward in a noticeable rhythm but progresses

in an untethered rush. Moreover, note how the third-person mode gradually

fades away. It fades so smoothly that readers are now, with or without their

awareness of it, made to read the lines as if Norman were addressing them

directly, hammering his floods of worries and doubts into their head. Read-

ers are tugged out from Norman’s thoughts as the third person mode re-

sumes, just before Bloch confronts them again with Norman’s recurring self-

doubts, torrents of emotions, and bodily sensations accompanying his ac-

tions as the chapter proceeds.

Perhaps it can be said that the author designs verbal features to gradually

break down the readers’ psychological resistance to Norman (if there is any),

gently sliding them into Norman’s frame of mind. They work to facilitate

readers’ affective understanding of, and spontaneous engagement with,

Norman’s labor and inner turmoil, paving the way for their eventual sym-

pathy for Norman. Regardless of the extent to which readers are transported

to Norman’s frame of mind, the ebb and flow of changes in the passages

sustain readers’ interest in, and attention to, what Norman is going through.

As a qualitative whole, the changes are sometimes felt like a particular cours-

ing forward or inward, other times a pulling away; sometimes there is

a sense of strain, other times one of ease. Consequently, reading the passages

as a whole induces the experience of effort. When it comes to the end of

the chapter, readers may even have a mild sense of fatigue, aligning with

Norman’s exhaustion.

Concluding remarks

I hope I have presented a compelling case for taking literary devices as

proper objects in a philosophical investigation of fiction and emotion. I offer

a framework that synthesizes philosophical inquiry with other academic

disciplines in understanding the somatic dimension of reading fiction in

silence. I hope that the synthesis can enrich and advance debates on fiction

and emotion. Specifically, I have shown how a passage’s verbal features can

induce moving experiences and sensory images, identified as two possible

triggers of non-cognitive embodied appraisals. The two related mechanisms

involved in the reading experience are the embodied understanding

of movement and non-propositional, sensory imagination. However, given

W h y L i t e r a r y D e v i c e s M a t t e r 35

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

the variety of styles and content that fiction offers, I do not wish to claim that

either of these two mechanisms is necessary in all cases, though I believe

that they are the more dominant ones. As said, my framework is not exhaus-

tive. There seems to be no formulaic rule for the two mechanisms to operate

in different cases either. As shown in my reading of Psycho, the passages

activate readers’ corporeal understanding of Norman’s movements of

thoughts and his body, so the embodied understanding of movement is

probably the dominating mechanism, though not necessarily to the exclusion

of sensory imagination. The somatic experience may draw more on readers’

embodied understanding of movement, and less on imagistic imagination,

than Wharton’s imagery-packed passage depicting how the environment

appears to Darrow.

Despite this, by broadening the spotlight to illuminate the content and

literary devices by which the content is presented, we are armed with more

conceptual tools to appreciate literary passages’ expressive value. Doing

so offers a fuller picture than the content-based approach of how a passage

(such as the example in Wharton’s The Reef) can focus readers’ initial atten-

tion in a way that prompts their emotional engagement even before

any meaningful content for cognitive judgments is available to them. It also

sheds light on how a work configures the more complicated emotion of sym-

pathy for the devil, one in which readers’ cognitive judgments and emotions

probably come apart. Recall Carroll’s view that sympathy for the devil can

result from readers shifting their moral assessment of the situation. If this is

plausible, then my reading of Psycho explains such a shift. It shows how

literary devices can be deployed to shape our moral assessments through

influencing our initial affective appraisals and subsequent cognitive evalua-

tion. They are typically not our object of attention, yet they enlist various

non-cognitive, emotional, perceptual, or embodied states. We may not be

aware of how such devices resonate with our body, nor are we conscious of

the occurrence of the “lower” bodily states—but they nevertheless imper-

ceptibly shape our “higher” cognitive evaluation. This understanding also

prompts us to ponder the extent to which Nietzsche was right in claiming

that “our moral judgments and evaluations are only images and fantasies

based on a physiological process unknown to us” and that “moralities are

a Sign-language of affects.”

Nietzsche 2019, Section 119; 2012, Section 187.

36 L o r r a i n e K. C. Y e u n g

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Bibliography

1. Bloch Robert (1959/2010), Psycho, New York: The Overlook Press.

2. Carroll Noël (1990), The Philosophy of Horror, Or the Paradox of the Heart, New York:

Routledge.

3. Carroll Noël (2001), Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

4. Carroll Noël (2013), “Sympathy for Soprano”, [in:] Minerva’s Night Out: Philosophy, Pop

Culture, and Moving Pictures, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

5. Carroll Noël (2020), “Literature, the emotions and learning”, Philosophy and Literature,

44, pp. 1-18.

6. Deleuze Gilles (1997), Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D.W. Smith and M.A. Greco,

London, New York: Verso.

7. Feagin Susan (1992), “Monsters, disgust and fascination”, Philosophical Studies, 65, pp.

75-84.

8. Feagin Susan (1996), Reading with Feelings: The Aesthetics of Appreciation, New York:

Cornell University Press.

9. Feagin Susan (2010), “Affects in appreciation”, [in:] P. Goldie (ed.), The Oxford Hand-

book of Philosophy and Emotion, New York: Oxford University Press.

10. Foroni Francesco et al. (2009), “Language that put you in touch with your bodily feel-

ings: the multimodal responsiveness of affective expressions”, Psychological Science,

20 (8), pp. 947-980.

11. Grimshaw Mark, Garner Tom (2014), “Imagining sound”, AM ’14 Proceedings of the 9th

Audio Mostly: A Conference on Interaction With Sound, Association for Computing

Machinery, p. 8.

12. Johnson Mark (2008), The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding,

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

13. Kivy Peter (2011), Once-Told Tales: An Essay in Literary Aesthetics, Chichester, West

Sussex, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

14. Kneepkens E. W. E. M., Zwaan Rolf A. (1994), “Emotions and literary text comprehen-

sion”, Poetics, 23, pp. 125-138.

15. Landland-Hassen Peter (2016), “On choosing what to imagine”, [in:] A. Kind and P.

Kung (eds.), Knowledge Through Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

16. Locke John (1975/1964), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, New York: New

American Library.

17. Matravers Derek (1998), Art and Emotion, Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press.

18. Nietzsche Friedrich (2012), Beyond Good and Evil, Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

19. Nietzsche Friedrich (2019), Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press.

20. Nussbaum Martha (1992), Love’s Knowledge: Essays on philosophy and Literature,

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

21. Nussbaum Martha (1995), Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Bos-

ton: Beacon Press.

22. Robinson Jenefer (2003), ‘Startle’, [in:] S Leighton (ed.), Philosophy and the Emotions,

New York: Broadview Press.

W h y L i t e r a r y D e v i c e s M a t t e r 37

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

23. Robinson Jenefer (2005), Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music

and Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

24. Schopenhauer Arthur (2014), The World as Will and Representation, Cambridge, New

York: Cambridge University Press.

25. Solander Tove (2013), “Creating the Senses”: Sensations in the Work of Shelley Jackson,

Umea: Umea Studies in Language & Literature.

26. Speer Nicole K. et al. (2009), “Reading stories activates neural representations of visual

and motor experiences”, Psychological Science, 20 (8), pp. 989-999.

27. Sontag Susan (1994), Against Interpretation, London: Vintage.

28. Steidele Angela (2007), “Reading with the body: Sound, rhythm, and music in Gertrude

Stein”, [in:] J.M. Krois et al. (eds.), Embodiment in Cognition and Culture, Amsterdam,

Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co.

29. Wiskus Jessica (2014), The Rhythm of Thoughts: Art, Literature and Music after Mer-

leau Ponty, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

30. Yao Bo et al. (2011), “Silent reading of direct versus indirect speech activates voice-

selective areas in the auditory cortex”, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23 (10), pp.

3416-3152.

31. Zhu Guangqian (1994), On Literature (Chinese), Taiwan: Shuquan Publishing House.

32. Žižek Slavoj (2004), “Is there a proper way to remake a Hitchcock Film?”, [online]

https://www.lacan.com/hitch.html [accessed: 30.06.2020].

38 L o r r a i n e K. C. Y e u n g

__________________________________________________________________________________________________