Framing surprise, suspense, and curiosity: a cognitive approach to the emotional effects of narrative

Abstract

This essay advances a new approach to readers’ emotional engagements with narrative, proposing to examine them in the wider context of readers’ storyworld (re)construction and comprehension. For demonstration, it applies this newly proposed framework to an analysis of surprise, suspense, and curiosity in narrative experience, the three emotional effects viewed by Meir Sternberg as narrative’s defining interests. By appealing to cognitive frames and reader’s framing acts, it identifies frame-shifting, frame-completion, and frame-matching as their respective underlying mechanisms. Effectiveness of this approach in practice may prompt us to rethink emotion’s proper role in narrative communication, as well as question the necessity of relying on a story-discourse dichotomy while addressing related issues.