Felt versus perceived emotions Fear and empathy during reading Edgar Allan Poe's "The pit and the pendulum"

Abstract

Although the investigation of emotions has rarely been the focus of modern narrative theory, studies analyzing represented emotions in narratives are published from time to time. In emotion analysis, cognitive poetics‘ innovation, as opposed to traditional narrative theories, lies in the additional possibility of psychological exploration of the reader’s felt emotions during reading. However, the difference between represented and felt emotions is not evident, as in many cases, typically, for example, in horror stories, the two often merge into one another. My aim is to show that in spite of such overlaps, it is possible to separate the two types of emotions from each other by identifying both the psychological mechanisms behind directly feeling an emotion and perceiving a represented one, as well as the textual cues triggering the above-mentioned mechanisms.

In my paper I will use this differentiation to introduce a new calssification system regarding horror fiction which I demonstrate on the cognitive narratological interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The pit and the pendulum.