Suspension of Disbelief

Abstract

In general, suspension of disbelief is understood to be an audience's tolerance of the fictionality of media content (→ Fiction). The phrase means that the audience accepts limitations in the presented story, sacrificing → Realism, and occasionally logic and believability, as well as the media content's aesthetic quality for the sake of enjoyment. Originally, the term traces back to the British Romantic and literary critic Samuel T. Coleridge (1772–1834), who used it to describe the necessity for readers of poetry to accept the fictive world proposed in literary work. Although Coleridge proposed suspension of disbelief as a stance a user has to adopt willingly – he speaks of the “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (Coleridge , 169) – in later publications the “willing” is often omitted. Only recently, suspension of disbelief has also been connected with the usage of electronic media such as → virtual realities and movies, or, more generally, of narratives (→ Presence; Cinema; Transportation Theory; Storytelling and Narration).

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