Abstract
This essay touches on representations and techniques of narrative empathy in fiction, including perspective-taking, empathic inaccuracy, personal distress, and Einfühlung. It suggests the range of means employed by novelists to experiment with readers’ human endowments of thinking and feeling about others. Traditional novels appeal to readers’ emotion and cognition, and evocation of empathy is a widespread goal of twenty-first century-fiction. This essay focuses on modes of formal experimentation employed strategically by contemporary novelists, including writers briefly discussed: Margaret Atwood, Edwidge Danticat, Marlon James, Ian McEwan, Patrick Rothfuss, and Sarah Waters. A closer examination of Rothfuss’ novella The Slow Regard of Silent Things (2014) illustrates a variety of kinds of narrative empathy appealing to readers’ emotion and cognition.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
On Hardy’s strategic narrative empathizing and his representations of characters blind to their own motives, see Keen (2014, 170–210).
- 2.
For a history of the term going back to its origins in late nineteenth-century German psychological aesthetics, see Wispé (1987).
- 3.
See Keen (2015) for a detailed account of Batson’s definitions and their corresponding forms in narrative empathy.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
See Bakhtin (1981).
- 7.
See Bhahba (1994).
- 8.
See Turner (1969).
- 9.
Sternberg introduces both concepts as early as the 1970s, but elaborates on them usefully in the 2003 essay “Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (II).”
- 10.
See Alber (2016) for a rich account of the impossibilities of narrator, character, time, and space that typify unnatural narratives.
- 11.
The Anglophone focus of this essay precludes mention of most Japanese graphic novelists except the language-free experimental manga by Yuichi Yokoyama. Yet, as Hillary Chute observes, “the medium of comics has always been experimental” as a “word-and-image form that registers temporality spatially” and has “pushed at the boundaries of the expected and acceptable with every fresh iteration, in every new format” (2012, 407). For example, Philip Meyers’ Life, a Tactile Comic for Blind People (2013) employs and engages with the braille delivery system.
- 12.
See Frederick Aldama and Herbert Lindenberger’s Aesthetics of Discomfort (2016) for a provocative set of conversations on disquieting art.
Works Cited
Alber, Jan. 2016. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Aldama, Frederick, and Herbert Lindenberger. 2016. Aesthetics of Discomfort: Conversations on Disquieting Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Atwood, Margaret. 2003. Oryx and Crake. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, 259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Batson, C. Daniel. 2011. “These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena.” In The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, edited by Jean Decety and William Ickes, 3–16. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bhahba, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Chute, Hillary. 2012. “Graphic Narrative.” In The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, edited by Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale, 407–19. London: Routledge.
Colie, Rosalie Littell. 1973. The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance. Edited by Barbara K. Lewalski. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Danticat, Edwidge. 2004. The Dew Breaker. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Egan, Jennifer. 2011. A Visit from the Goon Squad. New York: Anchor Books.
Eliot, George. 1856. “The Natural History of German Life.” Westminster Review XIX: 51–79.
Fludernik, Monika. 1993. The Fictions and Language and the Languages of Fiction. London and New York: Routledge.
Fogle, Richard Harter. 1949. The Imagery of Keats and Shelley: A Comparative Study. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Fowler, Karen Joy. 2013. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Gallese, Vittorio. 2003. “The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity.” Psychopathology 36 (4): 171–80.
Gowdy, Barbara. 1998. The White Bone. Toronto: Harper Flamingo Canada.
Greiner, Rae. 2011. “Thinking of Me Thinking of You: Sympathy Versus Empathy in the Realist Novel.” Victorian Studies 53 (3): 417–26.
Herman, David. 2018. Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
James, Marlon. 2014. A Brief History of Seven Killings. New York: Riverhead Books.
Keen, Suzanne. 2007. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2013. “Narrative Empathy.” In The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid. Hamburg: Hamburg University, January 22. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narrative-empathy.
———. 2014. Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination. The Theory and Interpretation of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
———. 2015. “Intersectional Narratology in the Study of Narrative Empathy.” In Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, edited by Robyn Warhol and Susan Lanser, 123–46. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
———. 2020 (forthcoming). “The Recovery of Genre in Postmodern British Fiction: Return of the Romance.” In The Cambridge Companion to British Postmodernism, edited by Bran Nichol. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lee, Vernon. [Violet Paget]. 1913. The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McEwan, Ian. 2001. Atonement. London: Jonathan Cape.
Oatley, Keith. 2011. Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. Malden, MA: Wiley.
Rosenblatt, Louise. 1978. The Reader, the Text, the Poem. Carbondale and London: Southern Illinois University Press.
Rothfuss, Patrick. 2014. The Slow Regard of Silent Things. New York: DAW Books.
Shriver, Lionel. 2003. We Need to Talk About Kevin. New York: Counterpoint Press.
Sternberg, Meir. 2003. “Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (II).” Poetics Today 24 (3): 517–638.
Stross, Charles. 2007. Halting State. London: Orbit Books.
Towles, Amor. 2016. A Gentleman in Moscow. New York: Viking.
Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process. London: Aldine.
Vermeule, Blakey. 2010. Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Waters, Sarah. 2006. The Night Watch. New York: Riverhead Books.
Wispé, Lauren. 1987. “History of the Concept of Empathy.” In Empathy and Its Development, edited by Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer, 17–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zunshine, Lisa. 2006. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Keen, S. (2019). Twenty-First-Century Fictional Experiments with Emotion and Cognition. In: Baumbach, S., Neumann, B. (eds) New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32598-5_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32598-5_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-32597-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-32598-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)