Rethinking Empathy through Literature

Meghan Marie Hammond, Sue J. Kim, Meghan Marie Hammond, Sue J. Kim

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138547889
• eBook ISBN: 9781317817369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Psychology

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.

Part I

Empathy and Reading

1 Novel Readers and the Empathetic Angel of Our Nature

Suzanne Keen

My book Empathy and the Novel (2007) was full of questions. It offered a preliminary definition of narrative empathy, later refined for my contribution to The Living Handbook of Narratology. Observing that narrative empathy is a prominent feature of the novel-reading experience, I described it as involving “the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another’s situation and condition” and argued that it “plays a role in the aesthetics of production when authors experience it, in mental simulation during reading, in the aesthetics of reception when readers experience it, and in the narrative poetics of texts when formal strategies invite it” (Keen “Narrative Empathy”). Rather than rehearsing all the arguments I put forth in Empathy and the Novel, this chapter touches just my contentions about narrative empathy and altruism, following up on research and theorizing that has been undertaken since 2007.

In Empathy and the Novel I posed dozens of questions about which I could discover little or no empirical research at the time, or about which existing studies pointed in contradictory directions. I summarized these in a series of hypotheses (169–71). This chapter does not attempt to catch up on all of the questions, many of which have been pursued—and taken in new directions—by other researchers in a variety of disciplines.

Instead, I zero in on the application of the empathy-altruism hypothesis to narrative empathy in response to novel reading. In Empathy and the Novel I contested the moral sentimental claim that novel reading inevitably works to form a more altruistic and peaceable citizenry. Martha Nussbaum, for example, evokes psychology’s empathy-altruism hypothesis in the context of reading fictional narratives.² Nussbaum promises a beneficial civic and moral yield from novel reading, a view that has also been embraced by philosophers of moral development and developmental psychologists. ³ This chapter updates the debate by offering some comments on recent work by another influential voice, Steven Pinker, in his important recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined (2011). It is to Pinker that I allude in my title, “Novel Readers and the Empathetic Angel of our Nature.” His nuanced account of change from a more violent to a more peaceable human species (over the long term) includes a cultural shift towards empathy and altruism but does not place undue causal emphasis on novel reading.

Whether narrative empathy and other feelings evoked by fiction reading actually result in moral improvement has been questioned, not only by me—the history of this suspicion goes back at least to the eighteenth century.⁴ A version of it appears in Saint Augustine’s lament that he was wasting his time feeling with Vergil’s fictional creations. Among moral philosophers, the debate about the status of emotional responsiveness to narrative typically centers on the question of whether it should be cultivated (to encourage recognition of other minds, enhance comprehension, or form morality) or distrusted, as a potentially misleading capitulation to a frame of reference warped by bias or as an incitement to unruly behavior (Plato). Ironically, the argument in favor of aesthetic emotions (cultivation through narrative) results in a more proscriptive, narrower list of valued narratives, while the suspicious argument (advocating dispassion) more willingly admits the potentially deleterious impact of narrative as encouraging escapism, time-wasting, and vicious habits. This latter side admits a broader range of narrative, including comic books, video games, and romance novels, but does so to warn against the dangers of emotionally-engaged reading practices. The stress marks between the two positions about narrative impact reveal different attitudes to reading itself, one admitting a broad range of narrative in an array of media (and fearing the impact of reading on people and society) and the other emphasizing the special benefits of reading canonical or at least celebrated and complex literary narratives (and promising the development of good world citizens and improved societies). Which is it to be? To approach these questions requires reference to research far afield from philosophy and literary studies.

The year 2013 marked the centenary of Vernon Lee’s foundational work on aesthetic empathy in The Beautiful: after a long hiatus, it is again a great time to be doing interdisciplinary work on empathy. I have written elsewhere on the sixty to seventy-five years following the first flowering of empathy research, during which scholarly and scientific conversations about literature and the emotions were rare, interdisciplinary study of aesthetic emotions scarce, and questions about what happens in real readers as they feel with imaginary worlds and their inhabitants discouraged as a disparaged “psychologizing” (Keen “Introduction: Narrative and the Emotions”). Following on the cognitive turn of the 1960s and the narrative turn of the 1990s, the affective turn of recent years encourages active reading of psychology by literary theorists—psychology rather than psychoanalytic theory, a psychology that includes brain science. New interdisciplinary combinations in the sciences of brain and behavior, such as social neuroscience, give the literary student of empathy a great deal to consider. Though modern empathy research has been going on steadily since the 1980s, this recent cross-disciplinary conversation marks a change in the situation. A decade ago when I went to my college library looking for something to cite on empathy as a component of literary reading, there were some resources to be found, but very little engagement outside of the separate silos of ethics, developmental psychology, cognitive science, and what was just then a very new research program in neuroscience, on mirror neurons. The theorists of film were in the vanguard of engagement with philosophers and cognitive scientists, some of the virtue ethicists were reading some of the developmental psychologists, but on the whole there was relatively little cross-disciplinary conversation around empathy. My home field of narratology, for example, was at that time virtually innocent of developments in discourse processing or the psychology of narrative impact.

Four publications since 2007 illustrate the difference a decade makes and impress with the interdisciplinary liveliness of the field: Jean Decety and William Ickes’s Social Neuroscience of Empathy, Amy Coplan and the late Peter Goldie’s Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, Jean Decety’s Empathy: From Bench to Bedside, and a recent issue of Emotion Review substantially devoted to empathy (January 2012). Each of these collections of essays contains work from scholars and scientists working in diverse disciplinary homes, and even though most of them frankly acknowledge the challenges of arriving at shared vocabularies and mutually recognizable concepts, there’s more evidence than ever before that the philosophers are reading the social psychologists, the cognitive scientists are reading the neuroscientists, the medical educators are considering the findings of the developmental psychologists, educational theorists, and practitioners, even that questions posed by humanists (including literary scholars like me) are getting some attention from empirical researchers. Re-evaluation of earlier theorizing in light of the new research proceeds apace.

The most salient challenges to the claims of Empathy and the Novel have come from psychologists and cognitivists working with literary texts in studies of narrative impact.⁵ Let me review my earlier argument against applying the well-substantiated empathy-altruism hypothesis (Batson) to experiences of narrative empathy. I doubted that fiction reading, even fiction reading of a certain elevated kind, focused on canonical works of the great tradition, produced good world citizens. I showed that it was difficult to disentangle novel reading from a host of other formative experiences that might encourage altruism or the lighter standard of prosocial behavior in individuals or whole societies. I believed that the world wars and genocidal violence of the twentieth-century, a century in which many novels were written and read, argued against a causal or even correlational relation between mass consumption of narrative fiction and concern for real others in the world. Steven Pinker’s redaction of the social science on declining rates of violence has made me re-evaluate that critique, as I will shortly discuss. I criticized studies that extrapolated from preschool children to predict behavior of adults. I differed with studies that claimed to show a causal link between experiences of narrative empathy and prosocial action in the world, when they confounded reading with the other activities employed with the experimental subjects. Adding a role-playing game, staging a discussion, even certain forms of solicitation to charity seemed to me to blend the reading experience with other prompts towards prosocial action. These studies primed the subjects to act prosocially, or confounded the results of reading and other incitements to emotional engagement and identification. Some studies erroneously attributed all the impact to the very short fictions or films that evoked empathy and ignored the effects of the activities involving real people on subsequent pro-social actions. The literary version of psychology’s empathy-altruism hypothesis, I argued, amounts to an unsubstantiated faith tradition without robust support by empirical demonstrations. Serious work still needed to be done to demonstrate that narrative empathy contributes to real-world altruism, personally costly and socially significant action on behalf of others.

In narrative empathy as in other aspects of moral development, people have more influence on other people than narrative fiction by itself. Questioning the causal link between altruism and narrative empathy devalues neither narrative empathy nor the widespread hope in the socially beneficial yield of novel reading. It shifts the emphasis to what people choose to do with their reading experiences, how they share them, and how they encourage themselves and others to act on feeling responses. While I do criticize causal arguments that equate experiences of narrative empathy with real world empathy for living others, I recognize that many writers and readers believe that there ought to be a connection. Thus my subsequent work on narrative empathy has focused on theorizing the conditions and circumstances that permit communication of authorial empathy to different audiences by means of strategic empathizing (Keen 2008). We should not forget the important contribution made by people themselves, around shared fiction-reading, as a vital component of the transaction from author to text to reader. Parents, teachers, librarians, reading-group participants, and enthusiastic book-recommenders everywhere are too ready to erase their own contribution, giving all the credit for impact away to the books themselves. Consistent with a pedagogical ethics of care, as advocated by Nel Noddings and Michael Slote, among others, I underscore the important role played in moral development by the people who love and share novels. Scratch any story about a novel that changed someone’s life, or her attitudes, or his actions, and you will find another person somewhere in there, taking a kid to a library, putting a treasured book in someone’s hands, leading a discussion, modeling the notion that our fiction reading shapes who we can become. So, while novel-reading can affect our vocabulary, our knowledge of the world, and our vocations, including the rare but wonderful effect of recruiting the next generation of novelists, as humanists we should recall the impact of other human beings on our moral development. Novels can’t be left to do that work on their own.

In Empathy and the Novel I suggested that immersion reading experiences of stories perceived as fiction, a phenomenon sometimes studied under the name “transportation,” are especially likely to be involved in narrative empathy. This suggestion has received some experimental confirmation from psychologist Dan R. Johnson, who has shown that training in visualizing mental imagery, following the work of Emily Holmes, encourages immersion reading, enhances empathy, and results in increased prosocial behavior as measured by a spill test. That’s a well-verified technique for measuring impulses to help, in which a collaborator “accidentally” drops a bunch of magic markers on the floor near the subjects. People whose empathetic natures had just been jogged by reading fiction immersively, after receiving mental visualizing instructions, voluntarily got up and stooped down to pick up the markers. They did so at a greater rate than less empathetic subjects. From my conversations with Dan Johnson I have learned that the subjects in the mental visualizing condition acted helpfully while those who had received perspective-taking prompts did not. Rather than overt “perspective-taking” imagining as in the social-studies version of fiction reading, which instructs a reader to “put yourself in the shoes” of the character (to enhance empathy), the related experiences of immersing oneself in an absorbing fictional world and joinin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Empathy and Reading
• Part II Empathy, Form, and the Body
• Part III Difficult Empathy
• Part IV Empathy and Genre
• Contributors
• Index