The residue of fiction in the memory of adolescence: The potential effect of reading fiction in Turkey

The Japanese psychologist and semanticist, Samuel Ichiyé Hayakawa, noted that: ‘It is not true that we have only one life to lead; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish’ (1990: 84). Presumably, while reading a literary text, readers enter new worlds and the lives of others. While ‘living’ the ‘life’ presented by the text, readers tend to develop similar attitudes to those of the characters presented in the stories. In particular, when a reader ‘identifies with 40a protagonist’, this may lead to developing a liking for the protagonist and cause the reader to adopt some of the protagonist’s attitudes (Mar and Oatley, 2008: 182). Therefore, the act of ‘living as many kinds of lives as we wish’ may bring many new kinds of characteristics and perspectives to the reader’s own self and this may cause a transformation in the reader. The fictional text can make the readers examine or change their own moral values (Currie, 1995), influence their psychology and behaviour, and perhaps even shape their personality (Djikic et al., 2009; Kaufman and Libby, 2012). This effect occurs even if the reader is aware that the text and the events are depicted in the story are not factual and true (Marsh and Fazio, 2006). According to Markus Appel and Tobias Richter’s research (2007), the information presented in fictional texts can turn into real-world beliefs in readers’ minds.