Why Martha Nussbaum is Right: The Empirical Case for the Value of Reading and Teaching Fiction

Abstract

In Love's Knowledge and Poetic Justice, Martha Nussbaum makes a compelling case for the value of reading fiction as a means to cultivate “judicious spectatorship”—Adam Smith's term for the ethical stance of a morally competent human being and responsible citizen. However, notwithstanding the power of her argument, it is essentially an argument from authority and hence, would be would be even stronger if supported by empirical data. Although not well-known within the humanities domain, such data does indeed exist, in the form of convergent lines of recent research into the neurobiological and psychological aspects of reading fiction. Supported by the fruits of this research—the accumulating evidence that reading fiction enhances social intelligence and cognitive empathy at a fundamental level—Nussbaum's confidence in the value of fiction as a “school for the moral sentiments” would appear to be supremely well-justified, and any programmatic decisions to marginalize the study of literature within the curricular spectrum supremely ill-informed.

«Jeg er så veldig redd for hvordan jeg påvirker elevene.» Utfordringer og muligheter i undervisningen av folkehelse og livsmestring i norskfaget

“…Nussbaum har blitt kritisert for å vaere vag og for å basere seg på intuisjon heller enn fakta. Likevel får hun støtte fra nyere forskning, der blant annet nevropsykologene Duncan et al (2017) argumenterer for at Nussbaums innsikter er veldokumentert i empirisk forskning. Nussbaums argumenter gir også resonans i moderne litteraturteori der blant annet Oatley (2016) viser hvordan skjønnlitteratur påvirker vår forståelse av verden og hvordan mennesker som leser mye skårer høyere på empati enn de som ikke leser skjønnlitteratur.…”

“…Tanken om at skjønnlitteraturen er mer kompleks og har et større meningspotensial enn sakprosa, støttes av forskningen (Weare & Nind, 2011;Duncan et al, 2017). L7 var også opptatt av dette.…”

Reading texts, reading people: Cognitive literary science and pedagogy

“…Social cognition has also received a great deal of attention within the cognitive literary sciences; as Burke and Troscianko (2017) remark, social cognition is one of the "Big Six" cognitive-literary topics (5). Duncan et al (2017) assert that evidence "has been accumulating for two decades in the form of convergent lines of research anchored respectively in neurobiology and cognitive psychology, which demonstrate how and why reading fiction enhances social intelligence and cognitive empathy" (245). The most well-known study in this research area is Kidd and Castano's (2013), "Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind."…”