Abstract
This dissertation addresses questions on the nature of reading stories, experiencing narratives and engaging with fictional worlds. It focuses on the characterization of the reader’s engaged narrative experiences of two novels by Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962). The main goal is to gain insight into how the language of literary fiction triggers different cognitive processes that allow readers to engage with narrative worlds and follow the mental functioning of fictional characters. This study integrates theory and method from literary studies, linguistics, computer science, communication studies, the philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences. By allowing complementary views on the nature of language, reading, comprehension and interpretation to come together, an all embracing account of characterizing the engaged narrative experience is presented, showing the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach for studying questions of interpretation and narrative engagement, which are at the heart of literary studies.
