Empathy and the NovelDoes empathy felt while reading fiction actually cultivate a sense of connection, leading to altruistic actions on behalf of real others? Empathy and the Novel presents a comprehensive account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Drawing on psychology, narrative theory, neuroscience, literary history, philosophy, and recent scholarship in discourse processing, Keen brings together resources and challenges for the literary study of empathy and the psychological study of fiction reading. Empathy robustly enters into affective responses to fiction, yet its role in shaping the behavior of emotional readers has been debated for three centuries. Keen surveys these debates and illustrates the techniques that invite empathetic response. She argues that the perception of fictiveness increases the likelihood of readers' empathy in part by releasing them from the guarded responses necessitated by the demands of real others. Narrative empathy is a strategy and subject of contemporary novelists from around the world, writers who tacitly endorse the potential universality of human emotions when they call upon their readers' empathy. If narrative empathy is to be taken seriously, Keen suggests, then women's reading and responses to popular fiction occupy a central position in literary inquiry, and cognitive literary studies should extend its range beyond canonical novels. In short, Keen's study extends the playing field for literature practitioners, causing it to resemble more closely that wide open landscape inhabited by readers. |
From inside the book
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Page vii
... philosophers of virtue ethics, feminist advocates of an ethic of caring, and many defenders of the humanities believe that empathic emotion motivates altruistic action, resulting in less aggression, less fickle helping, less blaming ...
... philosophers of virtue ethics, feminist advocates of an ethic of caring, and many defenders of the humanities believe that empathic emotion motivates altruistic action, resulting in less aggression, less fickle helping, less blaming ...
Page ix
They believe that novel reading opens their minds to experiences, dilemmas, time periods, places, and situations that would otherwise be closed to them. They emphasize the universality of human emotional responses in their reports on ...
They believe that novel reading opens their minds to experiences, dilemmas, time periods, places, and situations that would otherwise be closed to them. They emphasize the universality of human emotional responses in their reports on ...
Page x
... gender, weight, disabilities, and so forth.8 If empathetic reading experiences start a chain reaction leading to mature sympathy and altruistic behavior, as many believe, then discovering the narrative techniques involved matters, ...
... gender, weight, disabilities, and so forth.8 If empathetic reading experiences start a chain reaction leading to mature sympathy and altruistic behavior, as many believe, then discovering the narrative techniques involved matters, ...
Page xiii
Most important, it suggests why authors themselves so often vouch for the centrality of empathy to novel reading and believe in the power of narrative empathy to change the minds and lives of readers. The belief mirrors their own ...
Most important, it suggests why authors themselves so often vouch for the centrality of empathy to novel reading and believe in the power of narrative empathy to change the minds and lives of readers. The belief mirrors their own ...
Page xviii
Nussbaum, following the lead of Lionel Trilling, believes that learning respect for the hidden inner life of fictional characters leads readers “to attribute importance to the material conditions of happiness while respecting human ...
Nussbaum, following the lead of Lionel Trilling, believes that learning respect for the hidden inner life of fictional characters leads readers “to attribute importance to the material conditions of happiness while respecting human ...
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Contents
1 Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy | 3 |
2 The Literary Career of Empathy | 37 |
3 Readers Empathy | 65 |
4 Empathy in the Marketplace | 101 |
5 Authors Empathy | 121 |
6 Contesting Empathy | 145 |
A Collection of Hypotheses about Narrative Empathy | 169 |
Notes | 173 |
Works Cited | 209 |
Index | 235 |
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Common terms and phrases
activity aesthetic altruism Anil’s Ghost another’s argues authors Batson behavior believe Book Club brain Butler C. K. Stead chapter character identification character’s cognitive compassion contemporary cultivation cultural Daniel Batson discussion effects of reading Efuru emotional contagion emotional responses empa empathetic reading experiences empathetic response empathic inaccuracy emphasize ethical false empathy female Female Genital Cutting fictional characters fictional worlds fMRI gender genres Hakemulder Hoffman imagination individuals instance intentionally left blank J. K. Rowling Kuiken literary reading literature Martha Nussbaum Miall middlebrow mirror neurons Mistry’s Moral Development motives Nancy Eisenberg narration narrative empathy novel reading novelists Nussbaum Octavia Butler Ondaatje one’s Oprah personal distress popular postcolonial prosocial action psychologists reactions readers representation rescuers responses to fiction result role taking role-taking shared feeling social story suggests sympathy texts theorists theory tion tive understanding universal victims Victorian Wayne Booth Winfrey Winfrey’s women writing
Bibliographic information
| Title | Empathy and the Novel |
| Author | Suzanne Keen |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press, 2007 |
| ISBN | 0195343603, 9780195343601 |
| Length | 274 pages |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |