Emotional Imagining and Our Responses to Fiction

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present the disagreement between Moran and Walton on thenature of our affective responses to fiction and to defend a view on the issue which isopposed to Moran’s account and improves on Walton’s. Moran takes imagination-basedaffective responses to be instances of genuine emotion and treats them as episodes with anemotional attitude towards their contents. I argue against the existence of such attitudes,and that the affective element of such responses should rather be taken to be part of whatis imagined. In this respect, I follow Walton; and I also agree with the latter that our affectiveresponses to fiction are, as a consequence, not instances of real emotion. However,this gives rise to the challenge to be more specific about the nature of our responses andexplain how they can still involve a phenomenologically salient affective element, giventhat propositionally imagining that one feels a certain emotion is ruled out because it maybe done in a dispassionate way. The answer —already suggested, but not properly spelledout by Walton— is that affectively responding to some fictional element consists in imaginativelyre-presenting an experience of emotional feeling towards it. The central thoughtis that the conscious and imaginative representation of the affective character of an instanceof genuine emotion itself involves the respective phenomenologically salient affectiveelement, despite not instantiating it.