The Victorian Serial Novel and Transfictional Character at #NAVSA2016

I'm here in Phoenix to present my paper on the Victorian serial novel and transfictional character later today, which I will excerpt below. I look forward to the panel, and to meeting so many keen and friendly scholars at NAVSA throughout this weekend.

From my paper (please contact me if you're interested in the full versions or citations I mention here):

John Frow writes that fictional character is consistently confusing because the “concept is not specific to narrative theory but dependent upon cultural schemata defining the nature of the self” (“Spectacle” 227). Character, in other words, refers both to fictional figures and to human beings who have “characters.” Consequently, as Frow diagnoses, the “concept [of character] is both ontologically and methodologically ambivalent; and any attempt to resolve this ambivalence by thinking character either as merely an analogue of a person or as merely a textual function avoids coming to terms with the full complexity of the problem” (“Spectacle” 227). Henriette Heidbrink identifies this perennial problem as a tension between the medial construction of characters and the mental construction of characters, which amounts to a debate between characters as signs (the structuralist or formalist approach) and characters as humanlike entities (the humanist or cognitive approach) (72-73). Heidbrink points out that characters are “easily unhinged from their medial context and therefore seem to possess a certain autonomy” (67). She therefore calls characters “quasi-autonomous phenomena” (emphasis in original, 67). Given the evidence of characters re-appearing across serial installments and the narrative extensions that comprise media franchises, characters appear to be portable. Thinking through the slippage between textual descriptions of behavior, inferred persons, and real persons—and how serialized narrative makes these questions more urgent--is part of the purpose of this paper

Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider observe that “[i]t is a well-known fact that characters can appear in a number of texts” (9). Whether such a character is designated as transfictional depends upon whether the reader recognizes the character as the same. This recognition is contingent upon whether the character retains its “core features” (Eder, Jannidis, and Schneider 19), a judgment that allows an important margin for interpretation. Transfictionality, originally coined by Richard Saint-Gelais, occurs when “two (or more) texts share elements such as characters, imaginary locations, or fictional worlds” (Saint-Gelais qtd in Ryan 362). Transfictionality allows characters to be socially constructed through their portrayal in multiple texts. Whereas the identity of fictional character has usually been predicated on the character’s description within authorially-controlled text(s), transfictionality claims that the same character may exist in different texts, not necessarily authored by the same person. Recently, cognitive literary studies has sought to explain how readers recognize the persistence of fictional minds. By treating characters as implicit minds, cognitivists allow that readers may respond to fictional minds similarly to life: by assuming object permanence. The Victorian serialized novel elucidates this historical/fictional crux of transfictionality and object permanence through both its continuous proliferation and regular breaks, as well as the ways in which serialized stories have lent themselves to cascading media events where characters get transported and reimagined.