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Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies
Over the last few decades, character-based criticism has been seen as either naive or obsolete. But now questions of character are attracting renewed interest. Making the case for a broad-based revision of our understanding of character, Character rethinks these questions from the ground up. Is it really necessary to remind literary critics that characters are made up of words? Must we forbid identification with characters? Does character-discussion force critics to embrace humanism and outmoded theories of the subject?
Across three chapters, leading scholars Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi reimagine and renew literary studies by engaging in a conversation about character. Moi returns to the fundamental theoretical assumptions that convinced literary scholars to stop doing character-criticism, and shows that they cannot hold. Felski turns to the question of identification and draws out its diverse strands, as well as its persistence in academic criticism. Anderson shows that character-criticism illuminates both the moral life of characters, and our understanding of literary form. In offering new perspectives on the question of fictional character, this thought-provoking book makes an important intervention in literary studies.
Across three chapters, leading scholars Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi reimagine and renew literary studies by engaging in a conversation about character. Moi returns to the fundamental theoretical assumptions that convinced literary scholars to stop doing character-criticism, and shows that they cannot hold. Felski turns to the question of identification and draws out its diverse strands, as well as its persistence in academic criticism. Anderson shows that character-criticism illuminates both the moral life of characters, and our understanding of literary form. In offering new perspectives on the question of fictional character, this thought-provoking book makes an important intervention in literary studies.
160 pages, Paperback
First published October 23, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 7, 2025
It feels particularly satisfying to cross this one off the TBR list, where it’s been sitting since it came out the year after I finished my dissertation on literary character.
To some extent I think this book might be a response to an issue that is no longer so pressing, that is, a longstanding critical neglect of character in literary studies. I mean, academia in general has much more pressing concern these days, particularly the humanities, but within the world of literary criticism, the development of new theoretical approaches has made the ‘taboo’ against critical attention to narrative kind of irrelevant, and the last decade or so has produced some really innovative and interesting stuff. Just off the top of my head (and my TBR list) are Lucy Brookes’s Convention and the Individual in Medieval English Romance, Erica M. Bexley’s Seneca's Characters: Fictional Identities and Implied Human Selves, and Teagan Bradway’s “The Queerness of Character-Details.”
But all of these are from the last five years, and the literary landscape when I was writing my dissertation, and when Felski, Moi, and Anderson were writing this book, was a bit different. The goal of the book, as they say, is to find a more complex and nuanced ground between three strands of criticism: formalist critiques that disparage the idea of characters as implied persons and treat them as narrative functions (which overlooks a lot of how people actually engage with characters, cognitive studies that examine reader engagement with character through psychology (but, the authors caution, perhaps too narrow a view of psychology),and moral/philosophical use of character to explore ethical ideas (which perhaps overlook the literariness, per se, of literary characters.
The format of the book is interesting—I guess all the books in the series are written in this way, where you have three chapters, and each of them is by a different author, and the chapters don’t really have all that much to do with each other. It makes the book more a series of provocations than a coherent, developed argument, but it also means that the individual chapters can be referenced independently without difficulty and that we get three different takes on character that lay out different paths for future research.
Now, as a summer project, I’m keeping an annotated bibliography of my academic reading in an old-school paper notebook, which means that I have summaries of each of these chapters handy. So here you go:
Toril Moi’s “Rethinking Character” establishes an intellectual history of the taboo on “treating characters as if they were real. It situates L. C. Knights’s influential “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth” (1933) within the context of modernist aesthetics (which was Knights’s area of interest) and the emergence of literary criticism as a professional discipline. Outside this context, argues Moi, said taboo is not a philosophical necessity and seeks to solve a problem that does not exist. She illustrates this with a more in-depth look at John Frow’s Character and Person, which grapples with the “ontological hybridity” of characters. Moi compares this to the post-Saussurean linguistic idea of the relationship between signifier and signified, arguing again that this suggests this represents a split inserted by formalist theory that isn’t inherent to the concept of character. Finally she suggests that a “grammar” of examples, rather than an overarching definition, is more useful when talking about character.
Rita Felski’s “Identifying with Character” is also interested in challenging taboos around engaging with characters, arguing that identifying with a character is often confused with empathizing with that character or finding a fixed one-to-one sense of selfhood in them, which oversimplifies how identification works in practice. Similarly, a character does not have to be realistic for one to identify with them, and to identify with a character is not the same as confusing them with a real person. (She makes an interesting and, I think, quite supportable point here about characters having a life outside their texts because of their fictional status and properties.) Felski focuses on four modes of identification in the chapter: alignment (the formal link between audience and character, eg, point of view, which characters the narrative focuses on, etc.), allegiance (ties between audience and characters based on ethical, moral, or political values), recognition (recognizing oneself, in one or more aspects or in a positive or negative way, in a character), and empathy (sharing or responding to a character’s feelings). These modes of identification are often intertwined, and far from being opposed to critical reading of a text, they often inform critical readings.
The final chapter, Amanda Anderson’s “Thinking with Character,” is a kind of corrective to cognitive literary approaches that fail to account for interior or moral reflection and development. The novel, Anderson argues, is unique as a form in its strategies for representing rumination. “Rumination” is a key term for the chapter, defined as a form of thought resulting “from moral shock or disturbance” and involving “attempting to come to terms with these situations,” including “acute ethical dilemmas about how to act given competing claims or internal ambivalence” (133). What’s significant about rumination for Anderson is its “persistence and repetition” over a span of what she calls “moral time.” She argues that although rumination is often pathologized or otherwise viewed negatively, more recent studies have identified positive kinds of rumination as well, and that this kind of slow thinking about moral issues (shout out to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow here) is critical for inner moral life, not just quick moments of epiphany or decision. Much of the chapter is devoted to working through literary examples of rumination from Eliot, Trollope, and Woolfe. In a concluding section, Anderson looks at Iris Murdoch’s work on attention before wrapping up with a final argument that rumination may play an important role in understanding “the forms of thinking that characterize moral and political life more broadly” (166) and that attention to novelistic character is an important strategy for understanding rumination.
All in all, though there really aren’t a ton of connections between the chapters of Character, and though, as I said, it’s responding to a moment in the critical conversation that I think might have passed, it’s a useful little book. I think my favorite chapter was Felski’s, just in terms of thinking about models of identification I could apply to literary examples, but I learned a good bit from all of them, and it was certainly useful for me to read something of a more theoretical bent outside my normal "work reading" wheelhouse of medieval literature and history.
To some extent I think this book might be a response to an issue that is no longer so pressing, that is, a longstanding critical neglect of character in literary studies. I mean, academia in general has much more pressing concern these days, particularly the humanities, but within the world of literary criticism, the development of new theoretical approaches has made the ‘taboo’ against critical attention to narrative kind of irrelevant, and the last decade or so has produced some really innovative and interesting stuff. Just off the top of my head (and my TBR list) are Lucy Brookes’s Convention and the Individual in Medieval English Romance, Erica M. Bexley’s Seneca's Characters: Fictional Identities and Implied Human Selves, and Teagan Bradway’s “The Queerness of Character-Details.”
But all of these are from the last five years, and the literary landscape when I was writing my dissertation, and when Felski, Moi, and Anderson were writing this book, was a bit different. The goal of the book, as they say, is to find a more complex and nuanced ground between three strands of criticism: formalist critiques that disparage the idea of characters as implied persons and treat them as narrative functions (which overlooks a lot of how people actually engage with characters, cognitive studies that examine reader engagement with character through psychology (but, the authors caution, perhaps too narrow a view of psychology),and moral/philosophical use of character to explore ethical ideas (which perhaps overlook the literariness, per se, of literary characters.
The format of the book is interesting—I guess all the books in the series are written in this way, where you have three chapters, and each of them is by a different author, and the chapters don’t really have all that much to do with each other. It makes the book more a series of provocations than a coherent, developed argument, but it also means that the individual chapters can be referenced independently without difficulty and that we get three different takes on character that lay out different paths for future research.
Now, as a summer project, I’m keeping an annotated bibliography of my academic reading in an old-school paper notebook, which means that I have summaries of each of these chapters handy. So here you go:
Toril Moi’s “Rethinking Character” establishes an intellectual history of the taboo on “treating characters as if they were real. It situates L. C. Knights’s influential “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth” (1933) within the context of modernist aesthetics (which was Knights’s area of interest) and the emergence of literary criticism as a professional discipline. Outside this context, argues Moi, said taboo is not a philosophical necessity and seeks to solve a problem that does not exist. She illustrates this with a more in-depth look at John Frow’s Character and Person, which grapples with the “ontological hybridity” of characters. Moi compares this to the post-Saussurean linguistic idea of the relationship between signifier and signified, arguing again that this suggests this represents a split inserted by formalist theory that isn’t inherent to the concept of character. Finally she suggests that a “grammar” of examples, rather than an overarching definition, is more useful when talking about character.
Rita Felski’s “Identifying with Character” is also interested in challenging taboos around engaging with characters, arguing that identifying with a character is often confused with empathizing with that character or finding a fixed one-to-one sense of selfhood in them, which oversimplifies how identification works in practice. Similarly, a character does not have to be realistic for one to identify with them, and to identify with a character is not the same as confusing them with a real person. (She makes an interesting and, I think, quite supportable point here about characters having a life outside their texts because of their fictional status and properties.) Felski focuses on four modes of identification in the chapter: alignment (the formal link between audience and character, eg, point of view, which characters the narrative focuses on, etc.), allegiance (ties between audience and characters based on ethical, moral, or political values), recognition (recognizing oneself, in one or more aspects or in a positive or negative way, in a character), and empathy (sharing or responding to a character’s feelings). These modes of identification are often intertwined, and far from being opposed to critical reading of a text, they often inform critical readings.
The final chapter, Amanda Anderson’s “Thinking with Character,” is a kind of corrective to cognitive literary approaches that fail to account for interior or moral reflection and development. The novel, Anderson argues, is unique as a form in its strategies for representing rumination. “Rumination” is a key term for the chapter, defined as a form of thought resulting “from moral shock or disturbance” and involving “attempting to come to terms with these situations,” including “acute ethical dilemmas about how to act given competing claims or internal ambivalence” (133). What’s significant about rumination for Anderson is its “persistence and repetition” over a span of what she calls “moral time.” She argues that although rumination is often pathologized or otherwise viewed negatively, more recent studies have identified positive kinds of rumination as well, and that this kind of slow thinking about moral issues (shout out to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow here) is critical for inner moral life, not just quick moments of epiphany or decision. Much of the chapter is devoted to working through literary examples of rumination from Eliot, Trollope, and Woolfe. In a concluding section, Anderson looks at Iris Murdoch’s work on attention before wrapping up with a final argument that rumination may play an important role in understanding “the forms of thinking that characterize moral and political life more broadly” (166) and that attention to novelistic character is an important strategy for understanding rumination.
All in all, though there really aren’t a ton of connections between the chapters of Character, and though, as I said, it’s responding to a moment in the critical conversation that I think might have passed, it’s a useful little book. I think my favorite chapter was Felski’s, just in terms of thinking about models of identification I could apply to literary examples, but I learned a good bit from all of them, and it was certainly useful for me to read something of a more theoretical bent outside my normal "work reading" wheelhouse of medieval literature and history.
July 25, 2021
Thoroughly enjoyed these three essays on new ways to examine character in literary studies - I can't recommend Felski, Anderson, and Moi's essays enough.
November 16, 2023
obsessed with Rita Felski
April 27, 2024
Thank you Amanda Anderson for saving my bachelor thesis in the eleventh hour
November 8, 2025
Finished: Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies
I read this to justify my dislike of the Postmodern sentiment that has taken over academia. This was exactly what I needed: validation for reading texts outside a DEI framework, beyond focusing solely on the suffering and injustices of cold oppressive systems, and a call to connect with characters as interpersonal beings. I'll just list what resonated.
The trendy way to read was that "character was not a portrait of a human being but a node in a textual network," which is exactly in line with my current disgust. What matters in politics and academics isn't how you interface as a person but how trendy your identity and context. We're understood as creatures of "market-driven desires […] only as situated within ideological and sociohistorical contexts." And the brutal resulting view is of "humans as fundamentally self-interested or always seeking to maximize political advantage." Gross.
I was inspired by this book to offer symptomatic readings of symptomatic readers. Academics who obsess over the socioeconomic status of characters oppressed within the system are revealing their own obsession with their own socioeconomic position within academia. Universities earn big tuitions while scholars must publish or perish while earning meagre wages. If you're broke, you're going to pay keen attention to how the characters you read are broke as well. The distrust of grand narratives led to a viewing of power and oppression everywhere, without offering a distrust of that interpretation in turn. This makes them over-read economic oppression everywhere, which I find a disempowering way to exist. Double gross.
A little critical theory is a poison dragon; someone with just enough knowledge to dangerously misuse it. Novice gains make you feel like an expert before you've learned subtlety. "One of the more problematic legacies of critical theory […] has been a tendency to encourage leaps from the use of particular words to imputations of 'isms,'" which I'm sure many of us have seen. I don't notice it as much on X, but over on Threads, I’m fed too many posts calling out some from of either Fascism, Naziism, or Ableism. And so it holds: once you know a bit of critical theory, then often all you have is a hammer and everything begins to look like a nail. Nuance is lost. Many forget "the relation between word use and subscription to particular theories or philosophies is much more contingent and variable than such arguments are inclined to admit."
As I'm keen on Metamodernism, my ears perked up at the mention that identification with characters - rather than Postmodern readings - “is often equated with empathy, [and] can be ironic as well as sentimental" which is the key oscillation that Metamodernism preaches. Don't lean too heavily towards Modern sincerity or Postmodern cynicism. Both extremes are a bad deal. Find a way to live in both worlds. The last essay offers a great example. It’s an examination of how rumination is depicted in writing, acknowledging that while rumination is often described as negative and to be avoided, it also has positive and useful aspects. This is metamodern reading in practice, in holding both sides without collapsing into one.
Loved this book. It took me a while to read, as jargon lacks style, and so I could only stomach so much before I needed an extended break. I'm happy to have chipped through it on my weekends.
Hooray for more empathetic readings of characters and, in turn, of other people. Maybe soon the humanities will inspire some humanity in us.
I read this to justify my dislike of the Postmodern sentiment that has taken over academia. This was exactly what I needed: validation for reading texts outside a DEI framework, beyond focusing solely on the suffering and injustices of cold oppressive systems, and a call to connect with characters as interpersonal beings. I'll just list what resonated.
The trendy way to read was that "character was not a portrait of a human being but a node in a textual network," which is exactly in line with my current disgust. What matters in politics and academics isn't how you interface as a person but how trendy your identity and context. We're understood as creatures of "market-driven desires […] only as situated within ideological and sociohistorical contexts." And the brutal resulting view is of "humans as fundamentally self-interested or always seeking to maximize political advantage." Gross.
I was inspired by this book to offer symptomatic readings of symptomatic readers. Academics who obsess over the socioeconomic status of characters oppressed within the system are revealing their own obsession with their own socioeconomic position within academia. Universities earn big tuitions while scholars must publish or perish while earning meagre wages. If you're broke, you're going to pay keen attention to how the characters you read are broke as well. The distrust of grand narratives led to a viewing of power and oppression everywhere, without offering a distrust of that interpretation in turn. This makes them over-read economic oppression everywhere, which I find a disempowering way to exist. Double gross.
A little critical theory is a poison dragon; someone with just enough knowledge to dangerously misuse it. Novice gains make you feel like an expert before you've learned subtlety. "One of the more problematic legacies of critical theory […] has been a tendency to encourage leaps from the use of particular words to imputations of 'isms,'" which I'm sure many of us have seen. I don't notice it as much on X, but over on Threads, I’m fed too many posts calling out some from of either Fascism, Naziism, or Ableism. And so it holds: once you know a bit of critical theory, then often all you have is a hammer and everything begins to look like a nail. Nuance is lost. Many forget "the relation between word use and subscription to particular theories or philosophies is much more contingent and variable than such arguments are inclined to admit."
As I'm keen on Metamodernism, my ears perked up at the mention that identification with characters - rather than Postmodern readings - “is often equated with empathy, [and] can be ironic as well as sentimental" which is the key oscillation that Metamodernism preaches. Don't lean too heavily towards Modern sincerity or Postmodern cynicism. Both extremes are a bad deal. Find a way to live in both worlds. The last essay offers a great example. It’s an examination of how rumination is depicted in writing, acknowledging that while rumination is often described as negative and to be avoided, it also has positive and useful aspects. This is metamodern reading in practice, in holding both sides without collapsing into one.
Loved this book. It took me a while to read, as jargon lacks style, and so I could only stomach so much before I needed an extended break. I'm happy to have chipped through it on my weekends.
Hooray for more empathetic readings of characters and, in turn, of other people. Maybe soon the humanities will inspire some humanity in us.
November 11, 2020
Decepcionante, mas também (provavelmente) representativo do debate de agora por lá: psicologia cognitiva + filosofia moral, um estranho nivelamento de fandom e aquilo que poderia ser mais do que fandom, Wittgenstein aplicado - dentre essas três possibilidades, fico com o Wittgenstein (e o texto de Toril Moi), se tiver que escolher, mas não acho que o "estatuto ontológico peculiar dos personagens" seja de fato um falso problema.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews