Empathy and the Novel

Keen, Suzanne

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195175769.001.0001

Cited by 664 publications

(279 citation statements)

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“…Finally, we will synthesize our findings in our explanatory model in Section 4. We will make use of earlier overviews (Hakemulder 2000;Keen 2007;Kimmel 1970;Klemenz-Belgardt 1981;Mar/Oatley/ Djikic/Mullin 2011), adding other and more recent empirical work that will help us to build a synthetic framework for future research. Yet, before all this, we need to define the key terms (Section 1).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Literature on Empathy and Self-Reflection: A Theoretical-Empirical Framework

Koopman¹,

Hakemulder²

2015

Journal of Literary Theory

158

141

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Various scholars have made claims about literature's potential to evoke empathy and self-reflection, which would eventually lead to more pro-social behavior. But is it indeed the case that a seemingly idle pass-time activity like literary reading can do all that? And if so, how can we explain such an influence? Would the effects be particular to unique literary text qualities or to other aspects that literary texts share with other genres (e. g., narrativity)? Empirical research is necessary to answer these questions. This article presents an overview of empirical studies investigating the relationship between reading and empathy, and reading and selfreflection. We reveal those questions in the research that are not addressed as of yet, and synthesize the available approaches to literary effects. Based on theory as well as empirical work, a multi-factor model of literary reading is constructed.With regard to reading and empathy, the metaphor of the moral laboratory (cf. Hakemulder 2000) comes close to a concise summary of the research and theory. Being absorbed in a narrative can stimulate empathic imagination. Readers go along with the author/narrator in a (fictional) thought-experiment, imagining how it would be to be in the shoes of a particular character, with certain motives, under certain circumstances, meeting with certain events. That would explain why narrativity can result in a broadening of readers' consciousness, in particular so that it encompasses fellow human beings. Fictionality might stimulate readers to consider the narrative they read as a thought experiment, creating distance between them and the events, allowing them to experiment more freely with taking the position of a character different from themselves, also in moral respects. Literary features, like gaps and ambiguous characterization, may stimulate readers to make more mental inferences, thus training their theory of mind. However, apart from literature possibly being able to train basic cognitive ability, we have little indication for the importance of literary imagination over narrative or fictional imagination.Regarding self-reflection, while there is no convincing evidence that literary texts are generally more thought-provoking than non-literary texts (either narrative

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Literature on Empathy and Self-Reflection: A Theoretical-Empirical Framework

Koopman¹,

Hakemulder²

2015

Journal of Literary Theory

158

141

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show abstract

“…(Tarek, age unspecified, on Kirsten Boie's Skogland) 'Living along' with the text, is described here as connecting interest in fictional events with 'current times', as the possibility to mentally update what has been read. The reviewer, however, does not perceive this mental updating that the text prompts and the reader carries out as a cognitive achievement, which our discussion of Keen (2007) above showed it also is. Instead, he describes such updating as sensing, as an emotional experience of identification.…”

Section: Judgements Related To Emotionsmentioning

confidence: 76%

“…Emotional involvement plays a significant role in the readiness of adolescent readers to follow complexly structured fictions (Bertschi-Kaufmann, 2011). Findings on reading biographies underline the importance that a positive attitude has for reading activity (see Keen, 2007; for Germany, see for example Graf, 2013;Schön, 1993 and others) and how the 'communicative promise and anticipation of meaning' (Graf, 2013, p. 286) makes readers perceptive to the qualities of texts. Emotions, then, are not primarily the effect of literary understanding; on the contrary, emotions are one source of literary understanding and hence constitutive for literary judgement.…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Adolescent reading and the reproduction of literary judgement: what adolescent book reviews of self-selected texts reveal

Bertschi-Kaufmann¹,

Graber²

2017

L1 Educational Studies in Language and Literature

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A contrast is sometimes drawn between prescribed literary texts that develop literary judgement and, contrasting with them, self-selected texts read for pleasure. There is some scepticism in literature didactics about the ability of the latter to develop adolescents' literary judgement. This article reports on a study that questions this scepticism. One aim of the study was to establish whether and how adolescent readers can offer intersubjectively comprehensible and discursively negotiable judgements about the literary quality of texts with which they autonomously engage. A second aim was to determine with which elements of fictional texts they connect these literary qualities. We analysed 55 texts from a corpus of 450 reviews on the Swiss internet site www.jugendbuchtipp.ch in which adolescent readers write about self-selected books. These reviews provide information on the preferences of adolescent readers as well as their ability to perceive and convey their judgements on literary quality. We initially drew on concepts of literary evaluation from reception theory and then further inductively developed a 35-category analytic grid. Participants in a literature didactics research seminar at the University of Basel were closely involved in devising this grid with which to classify the various qualities of evaluation that adolescent readers applied in their reviews. Our analyses confirmed that adolescent readers do verbalise their judgements in intersubjectively understandable statements and arguments. These judgements focus on emotions, the perspective of characters, and the poetic form of texts, three aspects considered central in notions of literary judgement that are currently authoritative in literature didactics. Our findings suggest that autonomously selected texts can provide reading pleasure as well as develop the ability to deliver literary criticism. For literature didactics, our study illustrates the knowledge that teachers may derive from adolescent readers' book reviews about their learners' reading processes and their processes of literary judgement. Furthermore, involving students in the study, enhanced their capacity as prospective teachers to promote the development of adolescent readers' literary judgement. 2ANDREA BERTSCHI-KAUFMANN AND TANJA GRABER

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“…Although this type of research is inherently interdisciplinary, it retains both a strong linguistic focus and conforms to the underpinning principles of stylistic scholarship. In contrast, as an alternative form of study, cognitive literary studies emerges largely from empirical studies on the psychology of reading, empathy, and theory of mind, and is less focused on the analysis of linguistic content per se (Zunshine, 2006;Keen, 2010;Vermeule, 2010).…”

Section: Stylistics and The Analysis Of Children's Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Construing the Child Reader: A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis of the Opening to Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book

Giovanelli

2016

Child Lit Educ

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Empathy and the Novel

Cited by 664 publications

References 0 publications

Effects of Literature on Empathy and Self-Reflection: A Theoretical-Empirical Framework

Effects of Literature on Empathy and Self-Reflection: A Theoretical-Empirical Framework

Adolescent reading and the reproduction of literary judgement: what adolescent book reviews of self-selected texts reveal

Construing the Child Reader: A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis of the Opening to Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book

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