What Is Narrative Suspense? Evidence from Production Studies
Kathrin Hirsch, Tilmann Köppe, Edgar Onea · Journal of Literary Theory · 2025
Abstract Suspense is an important aesthetic feature of narrative media across different genres. Literary theory is concerned with elucidating the concept of suspense as applied to narrative literature. If literary theory wants to keep in touch with ordinary usage of the term ›suspense‹, then it must rely on an audience’s ability to judge scenes in narratives as to their suspensefulness. But how do we find out how someone understands the very concept of suspense? The present study explores this question by presenting three text production studies in which we ask speakers of German to relate both suspenseful (German: ›spannend‹) and non-suspenseful story continuations (Study 1) as well as story continuations that feature a protagonist who either is in a state of suspense (Study 2) or reasons about a suspenseful situation (Study 3). Our results suggest a number of insights into the concept of suspense. First, as participants find it easy to comply with the tasks of creating story continuations, we conclude that production studies count amongst the suitable means of exploring semantic correlates of ›suspense‹. Second, we find evidence that ›suspense‹ denotes a functional property of narratives. If the term is applied to narrative media, then this is because the text has a propensity to elicit a particular response on the side of the audience. Finally, we find that the narrative strategies that our participants employ correspond to particular strategies of suspenseful storytelling as predicted by suspense theory. We suggest that the standard account of suspense according to which suspense is a composite emotion consisting of hope, fear and uncertainty may be explanatorily inferior regarding our data as compared to question-based accounts that rely on more abstract (erotetic) features of stories.