Suspension of disbelief is a term used to describe the willingness of an audience to accept the unrealistic or fantastical elements of a story in order to fully engage with and enjoy a work of fiction. This concept is particularly relevant to media students, who must be able to understand how an audience interacts with different forms of media and how the medium itself can impact their ability to suspend disbelief.
One of the earliest discussions of suspension of disbelief can be found in the work of philosopher and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In his 1817 Biographia Literaria, Coleridge explains that, in order to fully enjoy a work of fiction, the reader must “suppose the story to be true, at least while he is reading.” In other words, the reader must be willing to set aside their disbelief in order to fully engage with the story.
In more recent years, media scholars have continued to explore the concept of suspension of disbelief. For example, in his 1986 book Textual Poachers, Henry Jenkins argues that fan communities often rely on suspension of disbelief in order to fully immerse themselves in their chosen fandom. Similarly, media scholar Marsha Kinder discusses the role of immersion and identification in her 1991 book Playing with Power, arguing that “the key to media consumption is a kind of active engagement that involves the audience in the process of suspending disbelief.”
However, not all scholars are convinced of the value of suspension of disbelief. In his 2006 book The Reality Effect, media scholar Joel Black argues that the concept is ultimately limiting, as it assumes that audiences are simply passive recipients of media rather than active interpreters. Black suggests that a more productive approach to understanding audience engagement with media would be to focus on the ways in which audiences actively negotiate their relationship to the text, rather than simply “suspending disbelief.”