Readers

This chapter explores the forces that give rise to consistent and distinctive features of readers’ narrative experiences. The first section of the chapter reviews cognitive science research on the processes that scaffold readers’ experiences. I consider how those processes (attempt to) provide readers with coherent experiences of narrative texts. I describe how readers’ narrative experiences are individuated as a product of the particular samples of memory that become accessible as narratives unfold. The second section of the chapter explores how readers are transported to narrative worlds and how they participate in those worlds. I discuss how narrative events and character attributes may produce instances in which readers’ experiences are consistent. In addition, I suggest that readers’ assessments of their similarity to characters will yield variability in their responses.