Download or read book Empathy and the Novel written by Suzanne Keen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-19 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Rethinking Empathy through Literature written by Meghan Marie Hammond and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Heating Cooling 52 Micro Memoirs written by Beth Ann Fennelly and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Consistently entertaining… always poised, eloquent, and full of moments of tenderness.” —Electric Literature The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of nonfiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Alternatingly wistful and wry, ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to shape a life from unexpectedly illuminating moments.

Download or read book The Tilted World written by Tom Franklin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set against the backdrop of the historic flooding of the Mississippi River, The Tilted World is an extraordinary tale of murder and moonshine, sandbagging and saboteurs, and a man and a woman who find unexpected love, from Tom Franklin, the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, and award-winning poet Beth Ann Fennelly The year is 1927. As rains swell the Mississippi, the mighty river threatens to burst its banks and engulf everything in its path, including federal revenue agent Ted Ingersoll and his partner, Ham Johnson. Arriving in the tiny hamlet of Hobnob, Mississippi, to investigate the disappearance of two fellow agents who'd been on the trail of a local bootlegger, they are astonished to find a baby boy abandoned in the middle of a crime scene. Ingersoll, an orphan raised by nuns, is determined to find the infant a home, and his search leads him to Dixie Clay Holliver. A strong woman married too young to a philandering charmer, Dixie Clay has lost a child to illness and is powerless to resist this second chance at motherhood. From the moment they meet, Ingersoll and Dixie Clay are drawn to each other. He has no idea that she's the best bootlegger in the county and may be connected to the agents' disappearance. And while he seems kind and gentle, Dixie Clay knows full well that he is an enemy who can never be trusted. When Ingersoll learns that a saboteur might be among them, planning a catastrophe along the river that would wreak havoc in Hobnob, he knows that he and Dixie Clay will face challenges and choices that they will be fortunate to survive. Written with extraordinary insight and tenderness, The Tilted World is that rarest of creations, a story of seemingly ordinary people who find hope and deliverance where they least expect it—in each other.

Download or read book Empathy and History written by Tyson Retz and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2018-07-27 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since empathy first emerged as an object of inquiry within British history education in the early 1970s, teachers, scholars and policymakers have debated the concept’s role in the teaching and learning of history. Yet over the years this discussion has been confined to specialized education outlets, while empathy’s broader significance for history and philosophy has too often gone unnoticed. Empathy and History is the first comprehensive account of empathy’s place in the practice, teaching, and philosophy of history. Beginning with the concept’s roots in nineteenth-century German historicism, the book follows its historical development, transformation, and deployment while revealing its relevance for practitioners today.

Download or read book Reader Come Home written by Maryanne Wolf and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the acclaimed Proust and the Squid follows up with a lively, ambitious, and deeply informative book that considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies. A decade ago, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid revealed what we know about how the brain learns to read and how reading changes the way we think and feel. Since then, the ways we process written language have changed dramatically with many concerned about both their own changes and that of children. New research on the reading brain chronicles these changes in the brains of children and adults as they learn to read while immersed in a digitally dominated medium. Drawing deeply on this research, this book comprises a series of letters Wolf writes to us—her beloved readers—to describe her concerns and her hopes about what is happening to the reading brain as it unavoidably changes to adapt to digital mediums. Wolf raises difficult questions, including: Will children learn to incorporate the full range of "deep reading" processes that are at the core of the expert reading brain? Will the mix of a seemingly infinite set of distractions for children’s attention and their quick access to immediate, voluminous information alter their ability to think for themselves? With information at their fingertips, will the next generation learn to build their own storehouse of knowledge, which could impede the ability to make analogies and draw inferences from what they know? Will all these influences change the formation in children and the use in adults of "slower" cognitive processes like critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that comprise deep reading and that influence both how we think and how we live our lives? How can we preserve deep reading processes in future iterations of the reading brain? Concerns about attention span, critical reasoning, and over-reliance on technology are never just about children—Wolf herself has found that, though she is a reading expert, her ability to read deeply has been impacted as she has become increasingly dependent on screens. Wolf draws on neuroscience, literature, education, and philosophy and blends historical, literary, and scientific facts with down-to-earth examples and warm anecdotes to illuminate complex ideas that culminate in a proposal for a biliterate reading brain. Provocative and intriguing, Reader, Come Home is a roadmap that provides a cautionary but hopeful perspective on the impact of technology on our brains and our most essential intellectual capacities—and what this could mean for our future.

Download or read book Empathy and the Strangeness of Fiction written by Maria C. Scott and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how and why narrative fiction engages empathy, including Theory of MindOffers a broad overview of current scientific work on the effects of fiction-reading on empathy, including Theory of MindProvides an original intervention in the field of literary theory, centring on the reflexive properties of the fictional strangerIncludes stand-alone close readings of three novels by important French authorsThis book studies recent psychological findings which suggest that reading fiction cultivates empathy, encouraging us to be critically reflective, suspicious readers as well as participatory, 'nave' readers. Scott draws on literary theory and close readings to argue that engagement with fictional stories also teaches us to resist uncritical forms of empathy and reminds us of the limitations of our ability to understand other people. The book treats figures of the stranger in Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir and Sand's Indiana as emblematic of the strangeness of narrative fiction, both drawing us in and keeping us at a distance.

Download or read book Rethinking Empathy through Literature written by Meghan Marie Hammond and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Art of Sympathy in Fiction written by Howard Sklar and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on the sympathetic effects of stories, and the possible ways these feelings can contribute to what has been called the "moral imagination." This book examines the dynamics of readers' beliefs regarding fictional characters and the influence of those impressions on the emotions that readers experience.

Download or read book I Am You written by Karl F. Morrison and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Important trends in contemporary intellectual life celebrate difference, divisiveness, and distinction. Speculative writing increasingly highlights "hermeneutic gaps" between human beings, their histories, and their hopes. In this book Karl Morrison identifies an alternative to this disruption. He explores for the first time the entire legacy of thought revolving around the challenging claim "I am you"--perhaps the most concise possible statement of bonding through empathy. Professor Morrison shows that the hope for thoroughgoing understanding and inclusion in another's world view is central to the West's moral/intellectual tradition. He maintains that the West may yet escape the fatal flaw of casting that hope in paradigms of sexual and aesthetic dominance--examples of empathetic participation inspired by hunger for power, as well as by love. The author uses diverse sources: in theology ranging from Augustine to Schleiermacher, in art from the religious art of the Christian Empire to post-Abstractionism, and in literature from Donne to Joyce, Pirandello, and Mann. In this work he builds on the thought of two earlier books: Tradition and Authority in the Western Church: 300-1140 (Princeton, 1969) and The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in the West (Princeton, 1982). "I Am You" goes beyond their themes to the inward act that, according to tradition, consummated the change achieved by mimesis: namely, empathetic participation. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Download or read book Empathy s Role in Understanding Persons Literature and Art written by Thomas Petraschka and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-03 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume critically discusses the role empathy plays in different processes of understanding. More precisely, it clarifies empathy’s role in interpersonal understanding and appreciating works of literature and art. The volume also includes a section on historical theories of empathy’s role in understanding. When it comes to understanding other persons, empathy is typically seen as a process that enables the empathizer to recognize a target person’s mental states, a process which is in turn seen as “understanding” this person. This volume, however, explores empathy’s role in understanding beyond mere mental state recognition. With contributions on processes of interpersonal understanding and understanding of literature and art, it provides readers with an overview over both differences and similarities regarding empathy’s epistemic role in two rather different areas. Since important roots of the debate about empathic understanding lie at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the historical section of the volume focusses specifically on this period. Empathy’s Role in Understanding Persons, Literature, and Art will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, aesthetics and the history of philosophy, as well as in literary studies and art history.

Download or read book I Am You written by Karl Frederick Morrison and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Important trends in contemporary intellectual life celebrate difference, divisiveness, and distinction. Speculative writing increasingly highlights "hermeneutic gaps" between human beings, their histories, and their hopes. In this book Karl Morrison identifies an alternative to this disruption. He explores for the first time the entire legacy of thought revolving around the challenging claim "I am you"--perhaps the most concise possible statement of bonding through empathy. Professor Morrison shows that the hope for thoroughgoing understanding and inclusion in another's world view is central to the West's moral/intellectual tradition. He maintains that the West may yet escape the fatal flaw of casting that hope in paradigms of sexual and aesthetic dominance--examples of empathetic participation inspired by hunger for power, as well as by love. The author uses diverse sources: in theology ranging from Augustine to Schleiermacher, in art from the religious art of the Christian Empire to post-Abstractionism, and in literature from Donne to Joyce, Pirandello, and Mann. In this work he builds on the thought of two earlier books: Tradition and Authority in the Western Church: 300-1140 (Princeton, 1969) and The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in the West (Princeton, 1982). "I Am You" goes beyond their themes to the inward act that, according to tradition, consummated the change achieved by mimesis: namely, empathetic participation. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Download or read book Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism written by Meghan Marie Hammond and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how fin de siècleconceptions of empathy are woven into the fabric of literary modernism Empathy is a cognitive and affective structure of feeling, a bridge across interpersonal distance. Coined in 1909 to combine English 'sympathy' and German 'Einfühlung,' 'empathy' is a specifically twentieth-century concept of fellow feeling. Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism looks into the little-known history of empathy, revealing how this multi-faceted concept had a profound effect on literary modernism. Meghan Marie Hammond shows how five exemplary writers (Henry James, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf) tackle the so-called 'problem of other minds' in ways that reflect and enrich early twentieth-century discourses of fellow feeling. Hammond argues that these authors reconfigure notions of intersubjective experience; their writings mark a key shift away from sympathetic forms of literary representation toward empathic forms that strive to provide an immediate sense of another's thoughts and feelings. But while literary modernism values empathic experience as an ideal, it is also teeming with voices that recognize potential for danger, even violence, in acts of empathy. These voices illuminate our culture's ongoing concern with empathy's limits. Key Features: Recovers early psychology, a discipline that has often been neglected in favor of psychoanalysis, as a framework for literary modernism Provides a conceptual history of empathy that expands our understanding of the modernist world Grants new insight into modernist technique by explaining how it relates to contemporaneous psychological and aesthetic theories on empathy Prompts a rethinking of empathy, a capacity that is as widely misunderstood as it is celebrated

Download or read book Empathy and Reading written by Suzanne Keen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-06-23 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book 9 11 Fiction Empathy and Otherness written by Tim Gauthier and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-04-02 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and Otherness analyzes recent works of fiction whose principal subject is the attacks of September 11, 2001. The readings of the novels question and assess the validity and potential effectiveness of both the subsequent calls for a cosmopolitan outlook and the related, but no less significant, emphasis placed on empathy, and exhibited in such recent studies as Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization, Karsten Stueber's Rediscovering Empathy, and Julinna Oxley's The Moral Dimensions of Empathy. As such, this study examines the extent to which "us" and "them" narratives proliferated after 9/11, and the degree to which calls for greater empathy and a renewed emphasis on cosmopolitan values served to counterbalance an apparent movement towards increased polarization, encapsulated in the oft-mentioned "clash of civilizations." A principal objective of the book is thus to examine the ethical and political implications revealed in the exercising or withholding of empathy. For though empathy, in and of itself, may not be sufficient, it is nevertheless a vital component in the generation of actions one might identify as cosmopolitan. In other words, this book examines the responses to 9/11 (in both Western and non-Western novels) in order to uncover what their dramatic renderings might tell us about the possibility of a truly globalized community. The attainability of any cosmopolitan engagement is contingent upon our abilities to understand the other, knowing always that otherness eludes our grasp, and the best we can do is imagine some version of it. It is primarily in this capacity that the novel has a role to play. Whether it is the challenge of connecting with the survivors of trauma and the inhabitants of a traumatized city, or with a hyperpower that has experienced its own vulnerability for the first time, or even with the terrorist who seeks to commit violent acts, these novels afford us the means of examining the complex dynamics involved in any exhibition of fellow-feeling for the other, and the ever-present potential failure of that engagement.

Download or read book The Bond of Empathy in Medieval and Early Modern Literature written by David Strong and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-09-20 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the various means of becoming empathetic and using this knowledge to explain the epistemic import of the characters’ interaction in the works written by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and their contemporaries. By attuning oneself to another’s expressive phenomena, the empathizer acquires an inter- and intrapersonal knowledge that exposes the limitations of hyperbole, custom, or unbridled passion to explain the profundity of their bond. Understanding the substantive meaning of the characters’ discourse and narrative context discloses their motivations and how they view themselves. The aim is to explore the place of empathy in select late medieval and early modern portrayals of the body and mind and explicate the role they play in forging an intimate rapport.

Download or read book Empathy Emotional Ethical and Epistemological Narratives written by Ricardo Gutiérrez Aguilar and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-06-07 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empathy is sometimes a surprisingly evasive emotion. It is in appearance the emotion responsible for stitching together a shared experience with our common fellow. This volume looks for the common ground between the results of Digital Media ideas on the subject, fields like Nursing or Health and Social Care, Psychiatry, Psychology, and Philosophy, and finally even in Education, Literature and Dramatic Performance.