Empathy and the NovelOxford University Press, 2007 M04 19 - 274 pages Does 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
Results 6-10 of 79
Page xiv
... result of earlier reading. The position of the reader with respect to the author's strategic empathizing in fictional world-making limits these potential results. I theorize that bounded strategic empathy operates with an in-group ...
... result of earlier reading. The position of the reader with respect to the author's strategic empathizing in fictional world-making limits these potential results. I theorize that bounded strategic empathy operates with an in-group ...
Page xvi
... result of her enthusiasm for books. Because of their complexity and thematic links to history, politics, economics, and many other aspects of our embodied experience, novels make good objects of academic study, though one hopes this ...
... result of her enthusiasm for books. Because of their complexity and thematic links to history, politics, economics, and many other aspects of our embodied experience, novels make good objects of academic study, though one hopes this ...
Page xviii
... results in civic good. The influential philosopher Martha Nussbaum sees novel reading as one of the core strategies ... result of this conscientious prompting Nussbaum does not wonder: she assumes it must be so. Her strenuous efforts to ...
... results in civic good. The influential philosopher Martha Nussbaum sees novel reading as one of the core strategies ... result of this conscientious prompting Nussbaum does not wonder: she assumes it must be so. Her strenuous efforts to ...
Page xx
... result of a carriage wreck. Hilarious? Do these scenes sustain a view of fiction as a fount of human sympathy? We don't in fact know how eighteenth-century readers responded to jokes that would be regarded as politically incorrect today ...
... result of a carriage wreck. Hilarious? Do these scenes sustain a view of fiction as a fount of human sympathy? We don't in fact know how eighteenth-century readers responded to jokes that would be regarded as politically incorrect today ...
Page xxii
... results of reading. All over the globe, novelists exercise their empathic imaginations in acts of world creation, in the hope of reaching readers and changing hearts and minds. I respond in this book to their invitation to feel with ...
... results of reading. All over the globe, novelists exercise their empathic imaginations in acts of world creation, in the hope of reaching readers and changing hearts and minds. I respond in this book to their invitation to feel with ...
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