Empathy and the Novel
Empathy and the Novel

Author: Suzanne Keen

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2007-04-19

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0195343603

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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.

Empathy and Reading
Empathy and Reading

Author: Suzanne Keen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-06-23

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 100059520X

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This pioneering collection brings together Suzanne Keen’s extensive body of work on empathy and reading, charting the development of narrative empathy as an area of inquiry in its own right and extending cross-disciplinary conversations about empathy evoked by reading. The volume offers a brief overview of the trajectory of research following the 2007 publication of Empathy and the Novel, with empathy understood as a suite of related phenomena as stimulated by representations in narratives. The book is organized around three thematic sections—theories; empathetic readers; and interdisciplinary applications—each preceded by a short framing essay. The volume features excerpts from the author’s seminal works on narrative empathy and makes available her harder-to-access contributions. The book brings different strands of the author’s research into conversation with existing debates, with the aim of inspiring future interdisciplinary research on narrative empathy. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in such fields as literary studies, cognitive science, emotion studies, affect studies, and applied contexts where empathetic practitioners work.

The Phenomenology of Love and Reading
The Phenomenology of Love and Reading

Author: Cassandra Falke

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2018-05-31

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1501342134

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The current revival of interest in ethics in literary criticism coincides fortuitously with a revival of interest in love in philosophy. The literary return to ethics also coincides with a spate of neuroscientific discoveries about cognition and emotion. But without a philosophical grounding this new work cannot speak convincingly about literature's relationship to our ethical lives. Jean-Luc Marion's articulation of a phenomenology of love provides this philosophical grounding. The Phenomenology of Love and Reading accepts Jean-Luc Marion's argument that love matters for who we are more than anything-more than cognition and more than being itself. Cassandra Falke shows how reading can strengthen our capacity to love by giving us practice in love ́s habits-attention, empathy, and a willingness to be overwhelmed. Confounding our expectations, literature equips us for the confounding events of love, which, Falke suggests, are not rare and fleeting, but rather constitute the most meaningful and durable part of our everyday life.

Who's Afraid Of... ?
Who's Afraid Of... ?

Author: Marion Gymnich

Publisher: V&R unipress GmbH

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 3847100505

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Fear in its many facets appears to constitute an intriguing and compelling subject matter for writers and screenwriters alike. The contributions address fictional representations and explorations of fear in different genres and different periods of literary and cultural history. The topics include representations of political violence and political fear in English Renaissance culture and literature; dramatic representations of fear and anxiety in English Romanticism; the dramatic monologue as an expression of fears in Victorian society; cultural constructions of fear and empathy in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and Jonathan Nasaw's Fear Itself (2003); facets of children's fears in twentieth- and twenty-first-century stream-of-consciousness fiction; the representation of fear in war movies; the cultural function of horror film remakes; the expulsion of fear in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go and fear and nostalgia in Mohsin Hamid's post-9/11 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

Marina Warner and the Ethics of Telling Silenced Stories
Marina Warner and the Ethics of Telling Silenced Stories

Author: Lisa Propst

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2020-12-17

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 0228005078

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Efforts to fight back against silencing are central to social justice movements and scholarly fields such as feminist and postcolonial studies. But claiming to give voice to people who have been silenced always risks appropriating those people's stories. Lisa Propst argues that the British novelist and public intellectual Marina Warner offers some of the most provocative contemporary interventions into this dilemma. Tracing her writing from her early journalism to her novels, short stories, and studies of myths and fairy tales, Propst shows that in Warner's work, features such as stylized voices and narrative silences - tales that Warner's books hint at but never tell - question the authority of the writer to tell other people's stories. At the same time they demonstrate the power of literature to make new ethical connections between people, inviting readers to reflect on whom they are responsible to and how they are implicated in social systems that perpetuate silencing. By exploring how to combat silencing through narrative without reproducing it, Marina Warner and the Ethics of Telling Silenced Stories takes up an issue crucial not just to literature and art but to journalists, policy makers, human rights activists, and all people striving to formulate their own responses to injustice.

Suicide Century
Suicide Century

Author: Andrew Bennett

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-10-05

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 110841804X

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Suicide Century investigates suicide as an increasingly 'normalised' but still deeply traumatic and profoundly baffling act in twentieth-century writing.

Empathy and Reading
Empathy and Reading

Author: Suzanne Keen

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-06-23

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1000595188

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This pioneering collection brings together Suzanne Keen’s extensive body of work on empathy and reading, charting the development of narrative empathy as an area of inquiry in its own right and extending cross-disciplinary conversations about empathy evoked by reading. The volume offers a brief overview of the trajectory of research following the 2007 publication of Empathy and the Novel, with empathy understood as a suite of related phenomena as stimulated by representations in narratives. The book is organized around three thematic sections—theories; empathetic readers; and interdisciplinary applications—each preceded by a short framing essay. The volume features excerpts from the author’s seminal works on narrative empathy and makes available her harder-to-access contributions. The book brings different strands of the author’s research into conversation with existing debates, with the aim of inspiring future interdisciplinary research on narrative empathy. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in such fields as literary studies, cognitive science, emotion studies, affect studies, and applied contexts where empathetic practitioners work.

Rethinking Empathy through Literature
Rethinking Empathy through Literature

Author: Meghan Marie Hammond

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-07-11

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1317817370

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In recent years, a growing field of empathy studies has started to emerge from several academic disciplines, including neuroscience, social psychology, and philosophy. Because literature plays a central role in discussions of empathy across disciplines, reconsidering how literature relates to "feeling with" others is key to rethinking empathy conceptually. This collection challenges common understandings of empathy, asking readers to question what it is, how it works, and who is capable of performing it. The authors reveal the exciting research on empathy that is currently emerging from literary studies while also making productive connections to other areas of study such as psychology and neurobiology. While literature has been central to discussions of empathy in divergent disciplines, the ways in which literature is often thought to relate to empathy can be simplistic and/or problematic. The basic yet popular postulation that reading literature necessarily produces empathy and pro-social moral behavior greatly underestimates the complexity of reading, literature, empathy, morality, and society. Even if empathy were a simple neurological process, we would still have to differentiate the many possible kinds of empathy in relation to different forms of art. All the complexities of literary and cultural studies have still to be brought to bear to truly understand the dynamics of literature and empathy.

Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro

Author: Kristian Shaw

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2024-03-13

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 1526157527

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A comprehensive collection of newly commissioned essays from world-leading Kazuo Ishiguro scholars which offers chapters on each of the novels (including the first publication on Klara and the Sun (2021)), short fictions, and screenplays, Kazuo Ishiguro: Twenty First Century Fictions offers a critical reappraisal of the 2017 Nobel Laureate while also uncovering important new thematic and stylistic insights