Life Writing and the Empathetic Circle

Suzanne Keen

《Concentric： Literary and Cultural Studies》 42卷2期 (2016/09) Pp. 9-26

https://doi.org/10.6240/concentric.lit.2016.42.2.02

並列摘要

This essay revisits Suzanne Keen's claim in Empathy and the Novel (2007) that writing perceived as fictional is especially effective at evoking readers' empathy. Building on her discussion of narrative nonfiction in Narrative Form (2015) and her prior theorization of narrative empathy, the essay proposes that we should see life writing as a special category of nonfiction that shares with fictional narratives the capacity to invite feeling responses and to evoke readers' empathy. The distinctiveness of life writing as a mode of nonfiction has infrequently qualified the conclusions of empirical comparisons of the impact of fiction and nonfiction on readers. In an attempt to redress the neglect of life writing in empirical research programs investigating the fiction/nonfiction contrast in narrative empathy, the essay theorizes how strategic narrative empathy might work in a nonfictional context and poses questions for future study.

並列關鍵字

affect ； fictionality ； narrativity ； narrative empathy ； paratexts ； life writing ； testimonio

參考文獻

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Anderst, Leah(2015).Feeling with Real Others: Narrative Empathy in the Autobiographies of Doris Lessing and Alison Bechdel.Narrative.23(3),271-90.

Appel, Markus,Malečkar, Barbara(2012).The Influence of Paratext on Narrative Persuasion: Fact, Fiction, or Fake?.Human Communication Research.38(4),459-84.

Cohn, Dorrit(1999).The Distinctiveness of Fiction.Baltimore:Johns Hopkins UP.

Cohn, Dorrit(1978).Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction.Princeton:Princeton UP.