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"Empathy in literature"
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Step forward with empathy
\"Empathy helps us to understand the feelings, perspectives, and situations of other people. Being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes helps you to be kind to others and be a person that others depend on for help. This empowering title offers helpful ideas, practical tips, and inspiring stories about how having empathy for others can help you reach your goals. From how to listen respectfully to the concerns of others to ways you can be a positive light in the lives of those around you, learn how to step forward with empathy to understand and help others!\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Empathy and the Novel
This book presents an account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Though readers' and authors' empathy certainly contribute to the emotional resonance of fiction and its success in the marketplace, this book finds the case for altruistic consequences of novel reading inconclusive. It offers instead a detailed theory of narrative empathy, with proposals about its deployment by novelists and its results in readers. The book engages with neuroscience and contemporary psychological research on empathy, bringing affect to the center of cognitive literary studies' scrutiny of narrative fiction. Drawing on narrative theory, literary history, philosophy, and contemporary scholarship in discourse processing, the book 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, but its proper role in shaping the behavior of emotional readers has been debated for three centuries. The book surveys these debates and offers a series of hypotheses about literary empathy, including narrative techniques inviting empathetic response. It argues that above all readers' perception of a text's fictiveness increases the likelihood of readers' empathy, by releasing readers from their guarded responses to the demands of real others. The book confirms the centrality of narrative empathy as a strategy, as well as a subject, of contemporary novelists. Despite the disrepute of putative human universals, novelists from around the world endorse the notion of shared human emotions when they overtly call upon their readers' empathy. Consequently, the book suggests, if narrative empathy is to be better understood, women's reading and popular fiction must be accorded the respect of experimental inquiry.
eBook
Prosaics and Other Provocations
Gary Saul Morson’s ideas about life and literature have long inspired, annoyed, and provoked specialists and general readers. His work on “prosaics” (his coinage) argues that life’s defining events are not grand but ordinary, and that the world’s fundamental state is mess. Viewing time as a “field of possibilities,” he maintains that contingency and freedom are real. To represent open time, some masterpieces have developed an alternative to structure and require a “prosaics of process.” Morson’s curmudgeonly alter ego, Alicia Chudo, invents the discipline of misanthropology,” which explores human voices from voyeurism to violence. Reflecting on his legendarily popular courses, Morson argues that what literature teaches better than anything else is empathy. Himself an aphorist, Morson offers a witty approach to literature’s shortest genres and to quotation in general.
eBook
Imperial emotions : the politics of empathy across the British empire
\"Over the last decades of the eighteenth century, hopes and ambitions turned to conceptions of the great southern land, and the British nurtured fond plans for the Antipodean colonies of Australia and New Zealand conceived as children of the British Empire, one day to assume a glorious inheritance. Many emotional ties first experienced within the British family were applied to, enlarged, and challenged by the relationships and scope of empire: ideas about inheritance and childhood, for example, shaped utopian views of the colonies, while racial exclusion could be couched in terms of class. From colonisation in 1788, the reality of invasion and violence against Indigenous people challenged this imaginary future, prompting mourning and erasure\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Of Human Kindness
What do ordinary citizens really want from their
governments? Democracy has long been considered an ideal
state of governance. What if it's not? Perhaps it is not the end
goal but, rather, a transition stage to something better. Drawing
on original interviews conducted with citizens of more than thirty
countries, Zizi Papacharissi explores what democracy is, what it
means to be a citizen, and what can be done to enhance governance.
As she probes the ways governments can better serve their citizens
and evolve in positive ways, Papacharissi gives a voice to everyday
people, whose ideas and experiences of capitalism, media, and
education can help shape future governing practices. This book
expands on the well-known difficulties of realizing the intimacy of
democracy in a global world-the \"democratic paradox\"-and presents a
concrete vision of how communications technologies can be harnessed
to implement representative equality, information equality, and
civic literacy.
eBook
In it together, in Zola? Empathic Encounters in Naturalist Fiction
At a time when the \"empathy turn\" is bringing disciplines from psychology to philosophy, and from ethics to literary studies, into ever-closer dialogue, Zola's fiction offers intriguing, complex examples of empathy. Framing my reading of three major novels of Zola relative to contemporary narrative empathy studies and broader societal concerns around empathy, I demonstrate how the Naturalist empathic narrative mobilizes the reader in the act of reimagining the experience and the values of fictional characters. In the process, Zola's fiction reveals the paradoxes and tensions of the empathy encounter, drawing the reader into a more problematized exploration of \"feeling with\" that anticipates debates in empathy studies today.
Journal Article
9/11 fiction, empathy, and otherness
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.
eBook
Medicine and empathy in contemporary British fiction : an intervention in medical humanities
Offers a new understanding of empathy and its relation to medicine and literature, as a critical intervention into the medical humanities
This book marks a critical intervention in the medical humanities that takes issue with its understanding of empathy as something that one has. Drawing on phenomenology and feminist affect theory, it positions empathy as something that one does and that is embedded within structural, institutional, and cultural relations of power. More than this, it questions the assumption that empathy is limited to the clinical relation, thinking about medicine as more broadly defined. Combining theoretical argument with literary case studies of books by Mark Haddon, Pat Barker, Ian McEwan, Aminatta Forna and Kazuo Ishiguro, this book also contends that contemporary fiction is not a vehicle for accessing another's illness experience, but is itself engaging critically with the question of empathy and its limits.
Key Features
Provides a strong conceptual underpinning for the notion of empathy, drawing on phenomenology and feminist affect theory
Relates the idea of empathy not only to the clinical relation but also to medicine more broadly defined
Repositions literature's role in the medical humanities from a vehicle to access patient experience to a strategic intervention into current debates on empathy and its effects
eBook
Of Human Kindness
An award-winning scholar and teacher explores how Shakespeare's greatest characters were built on a learned sense of empathy While exploring Shakespeare's plays with her students, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that teaching and discussing his plays unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in the classroom. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeare's genius lay with his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways. Cohen takes her readers through a selection of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice, to demonstrate the ways in which Shakespeare thought deeply and clearly about how we treat \"the other.\" Cohen argues that only through close reading of Shakespeare can we fully appreciate his empathetic response to race, class, gender, and age. Wise, eloquent, and thoughtful, this book is a forceful argument for literature's power to champion what is best in us.
eBook