Most film viewers know the experience of being deeply absorbed in the story of a popular film. It seems that at such moments they lose awareness of watching a movie. And yet it is highly unlikely that they completely ignore the fact that they watch a narrative and technological construction. Perhaps film viewers experience being in a story world while simultaneously being aware of its construction. Such a dual awareness would seem paradoxical, because the experience of the one would go at the cost of the other. We argue that the solution of this paradox requires dropping the notion of an undivided consciousness, and replacing it with one of consciousness as coming in degrees. In this chapter we present both cognitive and film-analytic arguments for differential awareness of story and narration/technology, and argue that a characteristic of absorption is to be found in story world super-consciousness.
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When reading literary narratives, we assume that readers can get absorbed in the story world and in the story's artifice. Since most absorption research focuses primarily on popular media, virtually no attention has been paid to the possibility that literary devices such as deviation could elicit absorption experiences or that absorption could be aesthetic in nature. This chapter takes an interdisciplinary approach combining insights from media psychology, literary studies, and aesthetics to present a theoretical framework for two different varieties of narrative aesthetic absorption during reading: story world absorption and artifact absorption. We propose that these varieties mirror the distinction made by narratologists between story and discourse and the distinction made by emotion psychologists between F and A emotions.
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