Louise Nuttall
Attributing minds to vampires in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend
Nuttall, Louise
Authors
Abstract
For Palmer (2004, 2010), and other proponents of a cognitive narratology, research into real-world minds in the cognitive sciences provides insights into readers’ experiences of fictional minds. In this article, I explore the application of such research to the minds constructed for the vampire characters in Richard Matheson’s (1954) science fiction/horror novel I Am Legend. I draw upon empirical research into ‘mind attribution’ in social psychology, and apply Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2008), and its notion of ‘construal’, as a framework for the application of such findings to narrative. In my analysis, I suggest that readers’ attribution of mental-states to the vampires in Matheson’s novel is strategically limited through a number of choices in their linguistic construal. Drawing on online reader responses to the novel, I argue that readers’ understanding of these other minds plays an important role in their empathetic experience and their ethical judgement of the novel’s main character and focaliser, Robert Neville. Finally, I suggest that the limited mind attribution for the vampires invited through their construal contributes to the presentation of a ‘mind style’ (Fowler, 1977) for this character.
Citation
Nuttall, L. (2015). Attributing minds to vampires in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Language and Literature, 24(1), https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947014561834
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Publication Date | Feb 9, 2015 |
Deposit Date | Apr 28, 2015 |
Publicly Available Date | Apr 28, 2015 |
Journal | Language and Literature |
Print ISSN | 0963-9470 |
Electronic ISSN | 1461-7293 |
Publisher | SAGE Publications |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 24 |
Issue | 1 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947014561834 |
Keywords | Fictional minds, mind attribution, Cognitive Grammar, construal, empathy, ethics, intermentality, mind style, I Am Legend, Matheson. |
Public URL | https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/745269 |
Publisher URL | http://lal.sagepub.com/content/24/1/23 |
Files
Attributing minds to vampires in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (v2).pdf
(612 Kb)
PDF
Downloadable Citations
About Repository@Nottingham
Administrator e-mail: discovery-access-systems@nottingham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search