Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room
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Marco Caracciolo
Marco Caracciolo (b. 1984) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen 〈m.caracciolo@rug.nl〉. His research interests include cognitive approaches to literature, narrative theory, and literary aesthetics. His publications include “Fictional consciousnesses: A reader's manual” (2012); “Narrative, meaning, interpretation: An enactivist approach” (2012);Letteratura e scienze cognitive (with Marco Bernini, 2013); andThe experientiality of narrative: An enactivist approach (2014).
Abstract
Drawing on a corpus of online reviews, my article carries out a qualitative study of readers' responses to the child narrators of two contemporary novels, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) and Emma Donoghue's Room (2010). What these narrators have in common is that they are both are affected by developmental disorders: Christopher, the protagonist of The Curious Incident, is on the autistic spectrum, whereas Jack – the five-year-old narrator of Room – was born and brought up in captivity. Through my analysis of the reviews I explore the interplay of defamiliarization and empathy in readers' engagement with these “strange” narrators; I also show how empathetic perspective-taking can work in tandem with sympathy (feeling for a character from an observer position).
About the author
Marco Caracciolo (b. 1984) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen 〈m.caracciolo@rug.nl〉. His research interests include cognitive approaches to literature, narrative theory, and literary aesthetics. His publications include “Fictional consciousnesses: A reader's manual” (2012); “Narrative, meaning, interpretation: An enactivist approach” (2012); Letteratura e scienze cognitive (with Marco Bernini, 2013); and The experientiality of narrative: An enactivist approach (2014).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Munich/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Semiotic degeneracy of social life: Prolegomenon to a human science of semiosis
- Heterosemiosis: Mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts
- Do speakers really unconsciously and imagistically gesture about what is important when they are telling a story?
- On the institutional aspect of institutionalized and institutionalizing semiotics
- At the intersection of text and talk: On the reproduction and transformation of language in the multi-lingual evaluation of multi-lingual texts
- Cave paintings of the Early Stone Age: The early writings of modern man
- Revisiting legal terms: A semiotic perspective
- Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room
- The development of an idea in a context of rejection
- Stopovers at logic and cybernetics: Georg Klaus's road to semiotics
- The sign in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit
- The semiotic logic of signification of conspiracy theories
- Biopolitics, surveillance, and the subject of ADHD
- Signification in atonal, amotivic music? Extending the properties of actoriality in Ligeti's second string quartet
- Translation, materiality, intersemioticity: Excursions in experimental literature
- Teleological historical narrative as a strategy for constructing political antagonism: The example of the narrative of Estonia's regaining of independence
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- Fashionable yet strategic similarities: Diego Velázquez's creative consciousness seen through Saussurean-Hegelian composite approach
- Piaget's system of spatial logic: The semiosis of index
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- Linking transculturality and transdisciplinarity
- Towards a semiotic theory of historico-cultural cycles: The semiotic contours of Spengler's “prime symbols”
- The taxicab-hailing encounter: The politics of gesture in the interaction order
- A semiotic model of visual change
- Semiotics, theatre, and the body: The performative disjunctures between theory and praxis
- On Peirce's diagrammatic models for ten classes of signs
- Phytosemiotics revisited: Botanical behavior and sign transduction
- Review article
- The dialogic lacuna in Fenves's Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time
