Storyworld Possible Selves

Book excerpt: This volume presents a multidisciplinary approach to narrative engagement within the paradigms of cognitive linguistics, cognitive narratology, and social-psychology. In their basic form, storyworld possible selves, or SPSs, are blends resulting from the conceptual integration of an intra- and an extra-diegetic perspectivizer. In written narratives, SPS blends function as hybrid referents for a variety of inclusive and ambiguous linguistic expressions, which are here explored from the standpoint of interactional cognitive linguistics, as instances of SPS objectification and subjectification. The model also draws on character construction and on the social-psychology notions of self-schemas and possible selves. This allows an exploration of emotional responses to narratives not just in terms of empathy or sympathy towards fictional entities, but also in terms of narrative ethics and of culturally determined and simultaneously idiosyncratic feelings of personal relevance and self-transformation.