Subjective anthropic cognitive strategies in characterizing characters Cover Image

Podmiotowe strategie antropopoznawcze w charakteryzowaniu postaci
Subjective anthropic cognitive strategies in characterizing characters

Author(s): Mirosław Grzegórzek
Subject(s): Theory of Literature, Sociology of Literature
Published by: Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza
Keywords: game; literary character; experiencing; otherness; empathy;

Summary/Abstract: The article proposes to look at the “character” through the humanistically defined catego- ries of games and play and the genological category of characteristics. Since a literary game is a special type of interaction between the creator of a work and its recipients based on curiosity or pleasure, it was assumed that among all the elements of the game with which the author influences the reader’s interest, the character plays a key role. Each encounter with a character in the experience of reading changes the“character” of the experiencing person, and such an ambiguous understanding of the noun “character” may signal its use in a substantial sense, close to the shape and, at the same time, the essence of something. This, in turn, gives the opportunity to look at the game with the “character” in Polish lessons as a game with the protean genological shape of the character’s characterization. Therefore, four possible formulas,anthropo-cognitive strategies have been proposed - figures of the game with the genre and the hero: 1) Immersion in the character, 2) Trying on the character’s costume, 3) A special relationship with the hero, 4) Mirror of oneself. All of these “individual stagings of otherness” are immersed in a category particularly predestined to combine all directions of acquiring “knowledge about oneself and a person” during Polishlessons - empathy, defined by Elżbieta Mikoś as “a special emotional resonance”.

  • Issue Year: 2023
  • Issue No: 18
  • Page Range: 161-172
  • Page Count: 12
  • Language: Polish