Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Characters - those fictional agents populating the fictional worlds we spend so much time absorbed in - are ubiquitous in our lives. We track their fortunes, judge their actions, and respond to them with anger, amusement, and affection - indeed the whole palette of human emotions. Powerfully drawn characters transcend their stories, entering into our imaginations and deliberations about the actual world, acting as analogies and points of reference. And yet there has been remarkably little sustained and systematic reflection on these creatures that absorb so much of our attention and emotional lives.In Engaging Characters, Murray Smith sets out a comprehensive analysis of character, exploring the role of characters in our experience of narrative and fiction. Smith's analysis focuses on film, and also illuminates character in literature, opera, song, cartoons, new and social media. At the heart of this account is an explanation of the capacity of characters to move us. Teasing out the various dimensions of character, Smith explores the means by which films draw us close to characters, or hold us at a distance from them, and how our beliefs and attitudes are formed and sometimes reformed by these encounters. Integrating these arguments with research on emotion in philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, and anthropology, Engaging Characters advances an account of the nature of fictional characters and their functions in fiction, imagination, and human experience.In this revised, twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Engaging Characters, Smith refines and extends the arguments of the first edition, with a substantial new introduction reviewing the debates on emotion, empathy, and film spectatorship that the book has inspired.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Foreword (p. xi)
• Preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition (p. xv)
• Acknowledgements (p. xvii)
• List of Figures and Frame Enlargements (p. xix)
• Introduction (p. 1)
• Part 1
• 1 The Saliency of Character (p. 17)
• 2 The Imaginative Spectator (p. 40)
• Part 2
• 3 Engaging Characters (p. 73)
• 4 The Threshold of Legibility: Recognition (p. 110)
• 5 Screens and Filters: Alignment (p. 141)
• 6 Soot and Whitewash: Allegiance (p. 186)
• Conclusion (p. 227)
• Afterword: Engaging Characters-Twenty-Five Years On (p. 237)
• Appendix: Segmentations (p. 277)
• Bibliography (p. 283)
• Afterword Bibliography (p. 294)
• Index (p. 303)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Formalist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic narrative theory cannot adequately account for character, since they reduce characters to functions (Propp, Barthes) or "effects" of the text (Greimas). Characters' motivations can only be understood in terms of their functions within textual systems. They are agents of patriarchal vision (Mulvey) or vehicles for an identification by means of which the viewer is rendered a passive subject. By contrast, Smith (Univ. of Kent) draws on cognitive psychology to provide ways of talking about character that quite successfully account for their variety and credibility, the activity involved in identification with them, and the logic of emotional responses to them. Discussing The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and Saboteur (1942), Smith demonstrates that identification does not require spectators to adopt the characters' values and beliefs but merely to understand them; identification is thus better seen as "engagement." The bulk of the book examines this engagement, which involves recognition (the spectator's ability or inability to construct character); alignment (the spectator's accessibility or inaccessibility to a character's actions, knowledge, and feelings); and allegiance (the degree of the spectator's moral and emotional commitment to the character). Smith's book provides upper-division undergraduates and above a first-rate model for the study of character in the cinema.