Empathy and the NovelOxford University Press, 19.04.2007 - 274 Seiten 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. |
Im Buch
Ergebnisse 1-5 von 71
Seite vii
... authors' empathy certainly contributes to the emotional resonance of fiction, its success in the marketplace, and its character-improving reputation. My discussion in chapter 1 of empathy as psychologists understand it and my historical ...
... authors' empathy certainly contributes to the emotional resonance of fiction, its success in the marketplace, and its character-improving reputation. My discussion in chapter 1 of empathy as psychologists understand it and my historical ...
Seite viii
... authors and publishers to connect the experience of empathy, including its literary form, with outcomes of changed attitudes, improved motives, and better care and justice. Thus a very specific, limited version of empathy located in the ...
... authors and publishers to connect the experience of empathy, including its literary form, with outcomes of changed attitudes, improved motives, and better care and justice. Thus a very specific, limited version of empathy located in the ...
Seite xii
... author appears to set up or invite. Situational empathy, which responds primarily to aspects of plot and circumstance ... authors in crafting fictional worlds play a role in inviting (or retarding) readers' empathic responses. This means ...
... author appears to set up or invite. Situational empathy, which responds primarily to aspects of plot and circumstance ... authors in crafting fictional worlds play a role in inviting (or retarding) readers' empathic responses. This means ...
Seite xiii
... 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 experiences as ready empathizers. Yet ...
... 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 experiences as ready empathizers. Yet ...
Seite xiv
... author's strategic empathizing in fictional world-making limits these potential results. I theorize that bounded strategic empathy operates with an in-group, stemming from experiences of mutuality and leading to feeling with familiar ...
... author's strategic empathizing in fictional world-making limits these potential results. I theorize that bounded strategic empathy operates with an in-group, stemming from experiences of mutuality and leading to feeling with familiar ...
Inhalt
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 |
Andere Ausgaben - Alle anzeigen
Empathy and the Novel Broadus Professor of English Suzanne Keen,Suzanne Keen Eingeschränkte Leseprobe - 2007 |
Häufige Begriffe und Wortgruppen
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