A prominent hypothesis in literary studies is that readers, especially those that are fully immersed, engage empathically with fictional characters. This dissertation provides a critique of the Cartesian assumptions embedded in contemporary (cognitive scientific) models of empathy and then goes on to provide an alternative account of empathy based on especially Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology. According to this alternative, empathy does not establish but rather discloses in reflection an already present intersubjectivity from which it is derivative. It is also held that readers who are fully empathically engaged in a literary text lose self-awareness. I provide a critique of this view and present a Husserlian model according to which full engagement with the other and continuation of a certain kind of self-awareness occur simultaneously. This phenomenological alternative is based on the notion that an experiential self-givenness or “mineness” accompanies all my experiences and is prior to any objectifying forms of self-awareness. I then critique Cartesian models of (self-)reflection and self-modification in literary reading and with the help of Heidegger suggest a phenomenological model within which the distinction between modification of beliefs and the modification that is inherent in experiencing becomes understandable as contingent on the form of ontological interrogation that Merleau-Ponty terms “radical reflection”. Finally, I present a series of empirical studies investigating whether the preceding theoretical distinctions are borne out in the experiences of actual readers of literary texts concerned with human finitude. Phenomenological methods, (Kuiken, Schopflocher, and Wild; Kuiken and Miall, “Numerically Aided Phenomenology”) were employed to 1) identify several distinct types of reading experience, 2) spell out how one of those types instantiates ‘existential reading’ as conceived here, and 3) provide convergent and discriminant validation of this type of reading experience. Of particular interest was whether a form of existential reading can be understood as an event during which readers engage the text through a form of empathic engagement that is grounded in an a priori intersubjectivity, that retains an experiential self-awareness or “mineness” simultaneously with empathic engagement, and that supports a non-Cartesian form of “radical reflection” that opens onto an ontological consideration of finitude.

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This study provides a precise definition of the term 'Kafkaesque' by enriching literary criticism with scientific theory and practice, including an experiment on readers' responses to Kafka. Dictionary definitions justify taking the term back to its textual origins in Kafka's works, and the works can fruitfully be analysed by investigating how readers engage with them through cognitive processes of imagination. Modern scientific developments posit that vision, imagination, and consciousness should be conceived of not in terms of static pictorialism – reducible to the notion of 'pictures in the head' – but in terms of enaction, i.e. as an ongoing interaction with the external world around us. Most traditional nineteenth-century Realist texts are based on pictorialist assumptions, while Kafka's texts evoke perception non-pictorially and are therefore more cognitively realistic. In his personal writings, Kafka wrestles with problems entailed by pictorialist conceptions of vision, imagination, and the function of language, and comes to enactivist solutions: evocation of perception that does not result in painting static tableaux with words. In his fictional works, Kafka correspondingly evolves a cognitively realistic way of writing to evoke fictional worlds that directly engage the cognitive processes of their readers; Der Proceß is a prime example of the 'Kafkaesque' text and reading experience, defined by being compelling yet simultaneously unsettling. Modulations in narrative perspective and evocation of emotion as enactive also contribute to the experience of the 'Kafkaesque' as compelling; yet Kafka's texts simultaneously unsettle by preventing straightforward emotional identification with the protagonists, and destabilising deep-rooted concepts of selfhood as singular and unified. The theoretical discussion of the 'Kafkaesque' experience as compelling yet unsettling is complemented and refined by an experiment testing readers' responses to a short story by Kafka. The term 'Kafkaesque realism' denotes Kafka's compelling yet unsettling non-pictorial evocation of perception of the fictional world. Kafkaesque realism falls into the broader category of 'cognitive realism', which provides a framework for analysing fictional texts more generally.