Marco Bernini

nence of fictional characters in readers’ lives once they have finished reading books. Reflecting on empirical data from a study of four hundred readers of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the article provides a model and a theoretical framework to account for readers’ reporting how fictional characters “stay with them” after readerly immersion (i.e., “experiential crossing”). To date, cognitive literary theories of immersion have focused exclusively on the other direction of transit: namely, how our real past experiences can sustain or enhance our experience of a literary narrative. By contrast, how fictional elements from a storyworld can surface or transmigrate into real-­life cognition has been basically ignored. The emersivity of fictional characters is intriguing and complex because it raises important issues regarding the possibility of entertaining in the real world intersubjective relations with non-­ actual beings, or what the article calls phantasmal intersubjectivity. The article concludes by claiming that the emersivity of literary characters can provide further empirical and theoretical ground to support claims about the impact of literary narratives in everyday life. It also argues for the relevance of emersivity to the broader study of permeability between imaginative and real worlds in human consciousness.

This article develops a fictionality-based approach to artificial intelligence, proposing that human–AI interaction unfolds through the dynamics of character engagement. Drawing on narrative theory, cognitive science, and AI studies, it examines large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude, and LAURA(modeled on Laura Palmer) as fictional objects of relation—emergent agents whose apparent minds arise through interpretive stances, narrative framing, and phenomenological opacity. Integrating Dennett's notions of real patternsand intentional stancewith theories of characterization and fictionality, it identifies four illusions—of independent agency, independent identity, codependency, and independent poetics—through which users perform mind-building and world-probing exchanges with AI. Distinguishing between designedand emergent fictionality, and between AI immersivityand emersivity, the article shows how linguistic patterning and cognitive projection together sustain real yet imagined forms of intersubjectivity. While such patterned engagements enable genuine cognitive and creative extensions, they also expose the ethical perils of counterfeit people. Fictionality, however, offers a training ground for double exposure—the capacity to navigate what is both real and fictive at once. The article concludes by proposing a view of human–AI interactions as introspection by computation: AI as a technology that extends self-knowledge through the externalization of mind.

Despite the recent proliferation of scientific, clinical, and narrative accounts of auditory verbal hallucinations, the phenomenology of voice hearing remains opaque and undertheorized. In this article, we outline an interdisciplinary approach to understanding hallucinatory experiences which seeks to demonstrate the value of the humanities and social sciences to advancing knowledge in clinical research and practice. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH utilizes rigorous and context-appropriate methodologies to analyze a wider range of first-person accounts of AVH at 3 contextual levels: cultural, social, and historical; experiential; and biographical. We go on to show that there are significant potential benefits for voice hearers, clinicians, and researchers. These include informing the development and refinement of subtypes of hallucinations within and across diagnostic categories; “front-loading” research in cognitive neuroscience; and suggesting new possibilities for therapeutic intervention. In conclusion, we argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH can nourish the ethical core of scientific enquiry by challenging its interpretive paradigms, and offer voice hearers richer, potentially more empowering ways to make sense of their experiences.