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 69
Seite vii
... sympathy for) fictional characters and other aspects of fictional worlds. As this book demonstrates, readers' and authors' empathy certainly contributes to the emotional resonance of fiction, its success in the marketplace, and its ...
... sympathy for) fictional characters and other aspects of fictional worlds. As this book demonstrates, readers' and authors' empathy certainly contributes to the emotional resonance of fiction, its success in the marketplace, and its ...
Seite ix
... sympathy for fictional characters. 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 ...
... sympathy for fictional characters. 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 ...
Seite x
... sympathy and altruistic behavior, as many believe, then discovering the narrative techniques involved matters, for it turns out in laboratory experiments that we humans, like other primates, tend to experience empathy most readily and ...
... sympathy and altruistic behavior, as many believe, then discovering the narrative techniques involved matters, for it turns out in laboratory experiments that we humans, like other primates, tend to experience empathy most readily and ...
Seite xi
... sympathy, and other forms of emotional attachment that readers defend very strongly” (152). Though studying these effects empirically has proven a challenge, an energetic interdisciplinary group of scholars has begun producing ...
... sympathy, and other forms of emotional attachment that readers defend very strongly” (152). Though studying these effects empirically has proven a challenge, an energetic interdisciplinary group of scholars has begun producing ...
Seite xx
... sympathy? We don't in fact know how eighteenth-century readers responded to jokes that would be regarded as politically incorrect today, but it does seem a bit of a stretch to imagine that empathizing with Evelina counteracts all the ...
... sympathy? We don't in fact know how eighteenth-century readers responded to jokes that would be regarded as politically incorrect today, but it does seem a bit of a stretch to imagine that empathizing with Evelina counteracts all the ...
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 |
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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