Suzanne Keen

A Theory of Narrative Empathy

We are living in a time when the activation of mirror neurons in the brains of onlookers can be recorded as they witness another’s actions and emotional reactions. 1 Contemporary neuroscience has brought us much closer to an understanding of the neural basis for human mind reading and emotion sharing abilities—the mechanisms underlying empathy. The activation of onlookers’ mirror neurons by a coach’s demonstration of technique or an internal visualization of proper form and by representations in television, film, visual art, and pornography has already been recorded. 2 Simply hearing a description of an absent other’s actions lights up mirror neuron areas during fMRI imaging of the human brain. 3 The possibility that novel reading stimulates mirror neurons’ activation can now, as never before, undergo neuroscientific investigation. Neuroscientists have already declared that people scoring high on empathy tests have especially busy mirror neuron systems in their brains. 4 Fiction writers are likely to be among these high empathy individuals. For the first time we might investigate whether human differences in mirror neuron activity can be altered by exposure to art, to teaching, to literature. This newly enabled capacity to study empathy at the cellular level encourages speculation about human empathy’s positive consequences. These speculations are not new, as any student of eighteenth-century moral sentimentalism will affirm, but they dovetail with efforts on the part of contemporary virtue ethicists, political philosophers, educators, theologians, librarians, and interested parties such as authors and publishers to connect the experience of empathy, including its literary

Fast Tracks to Narrative Empathy: Anthropomorphism and Dehumanization in Graphic Narratives

Fast tracks for human emotional responses precede cognitive processes, according to the neuroscientific investigation of emotions such as anger and empathy1 and the psychology of “mind-reading,” via fast, unconscious recognition of facial expressions.2 Even simplified line drawings of facial expressions3 activate the “quick and dirty”4 subcortical bases of emotions that are followed by slightly slower cognitive responses routed through the neocortex. In comics and graphic narratives, illustrations of faces and bodily postures may capitalize on the availability of visual coding for human emotions, eliciting readers’ feelings before they even read the accompanying text.5 Little is known, however, about the relationship between the emotional responses evoked by visual artists’ strategies of anthropomorphizing animal faces or dehumanizing people’s faces and bodies, on the one hand, and the invitations to narrative empathy proffered by graphic storytelling, on the other hand. Drawing on my previous work on empathy vis-à-vis print narratives (see Keen, Empathy and “Strategic Empathizing”), the current essay explores the opportunities and challenges that graphic narratives pose for research in this domain. Specifically, I seek to open a conversation about the impact of emotionally charged sequences of word-image combinations used in the service of what I term ambassadorial strategic empathy. At issue are graphic narratives that reach popular audiences (including teenaged readers) with appeals for recognition and justice and ambitions to form citizens’ sense of responsibility for suffering others. I focus on two case studies that highlight how questions of medium specificity need to be taken into account in research on narrative empathy. J. P. Stassen’s (2000, trans. 2006) Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda, a graphic narrative about a boy caught up as an unwilling participant in the Rwandan civil war and genocide, renders dehumanization vividly: the boy turns into an animal in four stark frames of transformation. Brian K. Vaughan’s 2006 Pride of Baghdad (art by Niko Henrichon) employs more traditional anthropomorphism to depict the perspectives of a group of lions escaped from the Baghdad Zoo during the invasion of Iraq. Both narratives employ what I have theorized as ambassadorial strategic empathy

Strategic Empathizing: Techniques of Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Narrative Empathy

This essay in the field of rhetorical narratology theorizes three varieties of authors’ strategic empathizing, adding to the understanding of the relationship among idealized authorial audiences and actual, historic audiences made up of a variety of real readers. Keen suggests that authorial strategic empathizing can be discerned by studying techniques of bounded, ambassadorial, and broadcast narrative empathy in novels.ZusammenfassungDieser Aufsatz aus dem Gebiet der rhetorischen Narratologie konzeptualisiert drei Formen strategischer Autorenempathie. Er trägt damit zum Verständnis der Beziehungen zwischen idealisierten auktorialen und tatsächlichen historischen Leserschaften mit einer Vielzahl realer Leser und Leserinnen bei. Keen schlägt vor, auktoriale strategische Empathie durch die Unterscheidung von Techniken eingegrenzter, diplomatischer und weit gestreuter Empathie zu beschreiben.

Empathetic Hardy: Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Strategies of Narrative Empathy

Suzanne Keen is the Thomas H. Broadus Professor of English at Washington and Lee University

Introduction: Narrative and the Emotions

Suzanne Keen is the Thomas H. Broadus Professor of English at Washington and Lee University

Readers' Temperaments and Fictional Character

“Readers’ Temperaments and Fictional Character” advocates reviving study of ordinary readers’ variable responses to fictional characters to change the direction of theorizing about character. Admitting the wide range of possible responses to fictional characters limits the governing authority of texts over their denizens and writers over their humanlike creations, I argue here that human temperaments shape reading experiences more markedly than fiction-reading shapes people’s temperaments. The essay concludes with considerations of a revised pedagogy that opens up to the divergent responses predicted by a theory of temperamental character, mediating formalist and subjectivist practices by means of exercises based on Baruch Hochman’s cognitive theory of fictional character.

Pivoting towards Empiricism: A Response to Fletcher and Monterosso

Suzanne Keen’s response to Fletcher and Monterosso evaluates their contribution to cognitive narratology and the psychology of narrative impact. Arguing that “there is more than one possible function for FID,” Fletcher and Monterosso design a clever experiment manipulating textual samples by increasing the amount of discourse in free indirect style in contrast to thought report (psycho-narration) or externalized narration in the originals. Employing follow-up questionnaires about affective response, perspective taking and role taking on the one hand, and attitudes towards revenge on the other hand, Fletcher and Monterosso discover that while FID enriched samples aroused emotional engagement in some readers, the increased emotional response was felt for the victim’s suffering rather than inducing empathy with the revenger’s emotions and actions. Keen discusses the narratological component, free indirect discourse, the link to reader’s empathy, and the methodology of Fletcher and Monterosso’s textual manipulations. With a nod to Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading, Keen notes that Fletcher and Monterosso’s work depicts active readers responding differently from one another. She offers cautions about the constitution of research subject pools, which should be as diverse as possible to arrive at persuasive observations about the impact of form. Keen affirms that narrative theorists can both contribute to and benefit from study of the various psychological responses to manipulations of narrative techniques.

QUAKER DRESS, SEXUALITY, AND THE DOMESTICATION OF REFORM IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

W HY ARE JANE EYRE AND DOROTHEA BROOKE clad by their creators in “Quakerish” garb? The oppositional plainness and simplicity of Quakerish heroines have often been read as signs of classlessness and sexlessness. 1 Plain and simple clothing seems, to both Victorian and contemporary eyes, part of the package of reticence, reserve, and repression associated with the evangelical wing of nineteenth-century dissenting sects. 2 The typical sociological view of the function of dress within conservative religious groups holds that “strict dress codes are enforced because dress is considered symbolic of religiosity. Hence dress becomes a symbol of social control as it controls the external body” (Arthur 1). The control of female sexuality and the restraint of desire would seem to be the core function of modest clothing. Then the plain dress of some of the liveliest heroines of Victorian fiction presents a puzzle that can be solved only by recuperating the meaning of that clothing for Victorians. As fashion historian Anne Hollander points out, nineteenth-century novels testify to the way that clothes “always correctly express character” ( Feeding the Eye 12), but the meaning of particular articles of clothing or styles can slip away. Accurately reading the characters of Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot thus requires careful interpretation of their dress, in this case reversing the conventional reading of their plain, modest, and simple style. This essay argues that Quakerish clothing expresses both a promise of spirited sexuality and an admonition about the class-crossing potential of the respectable female contained within it.

Probable Impossibilities: Historical Romance Readers Talk Back

1. One could argue that a few a priori principles are needed to get the process of theory construction going in the first place, just as axioms and postulates are needed to get any kind of argumentation going, but these should be reduced to a minimum. 2. Translations are from Richmond Lattimore’s edition. 3. When Hekabe says that Priam has a heart of iron, she means that he has lost his ability to feel for others, but when Achilles says the same, he is remarking on Priam’s courage. In either case, Priam’s action is unthinkable. 4. The Sword in the Stone was first published in 1938 as an independent novel, but in a revised form it became the first part of a longer narrative, The Once and Future King, first published in 1958. I refer to the earlier version (Fontana, 1971), but for the point of my discussion either version will do. 5. White’s narrative also involves extensive anachronisms, which are foregrounded in the text. These present further questions of probability, which I will not discuss here. 6. Aristotle’s Greek original is not quite so neat: προαιρεῖθαι τε δεῖ ἀδύνατα εἰκότα μᾶλλον ἢ δυνατὰ ἀπίθανα (1460α): “it is necessary to choose an impossible likelihood rather than a possible incredibility.”

Digital Humanities in the Teaching of Narrative

In this chapter I distill some of the benefits that can be realized in the undergraduate literature classroom by replacing one or more traditional writing assignments with group (crowd-sourced) or individual projects employing Digital Humanities (DH) techniques of analysis, visualization and interpretation of narrative. I describe a modest mapping exercise in a course about London novels, with a frank account of the start-up effort required and the surprising cognitive gains realized by its incorporation into a traditional English syllabus. In a brief account of a pedagogically focused Digital Humanities Initiative at a small liberal arts college, I show how undergraduates gain a digital skill set and more acute engagement with narrative texts by participating in Text Encoding Initiative markup of a digital edition of a medieval epic poem. I refer to colleagues’ DH projects, for example involving undergraduate students in research that maps characters’ movements in space, leading to new interpretations of canonical texts. The centerpiece of the chapter shares an original discovery about the sources and influences on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent that came out of DH pedagogy.