Suzanne Keen Narrative Empathy as Animator of the Inanimate
Suzanne Keen (Scripps College)
“Narrative Empathy as Animator of the Inanimate”
Suzanne Keen is Professor of English at Scripps College. A narrative theorist and critic of the novel, she is best known for her work on narrative empathy, which she has examined in papers and books, from the 2006 “A Theory of Narrative Empathy” and Empathy and the Novel (Oxford, 2007) to the recent collection Empathy and Reading: Affect, Impact, and the Co-Creating Reader (Routledge, 2022). Her book Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination (2014), was a Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award finalist.
Narrative empathy as animator of the inanimate
Abstract:
Keen explores readers’ co-creative and empathy-experiencing role in relation to multiple potential targets involved in narrative communication, not only characters, in an essay that treats Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Feathertop: A Moralized Legend” (1852). Extending Hannah Wojciehowski and Vittorio Gallese’s initiating work on embodied narratology, Keen supplements their focus on characters and authors with theorizing about narrators, narratees, and implied readers. The essay draws attention to the impact of multiple roles in the narrative communication model on narrative immersion and empathy. Literary narratives may foreground for empathy the voice, role, or invited reaction of a narratee, or the un/reliability, attitudinal consonance or dissonance of a narrator, just as they offer armatures for affective resonance via character. Fiction reading offers not just information about imagined social worlds and the selves that navigate them, but sociality that arises from the roles of narrative communication. Engaging with these roles is both a natural and little perceived aspect of reading fictional narrative, a co-creative engagement entangled with readers’ Einfühlung, and in Ellen Esrock’s terminology, through transomatization. Authors, real and implied, narrators, narratees, implied readers, and sometimes other actual readers may call upon a reader’s empathy through roles that possess their own inherent intercorporeal cues.
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Il Laboratorio interdipartimentale N&H dell’Università degli Studi di Parma ha lo scopo di promuovere e sviluppare la ricerca nell’ambito delle relazioni tra le discipline umanistiche e le neuroscienze cognitive. Questo obiettivo è perseguito attraverso la realizzazione di progetti di ricerca scientifica, workshop, seminari, conferenze e convegni, promozioni di reti di ricerca e di Fellowships, costruzione di relazioni nazionali e internazionali con altri Atenei e Centri di ricerca attivi in questo campo, sviluppando rapporti sia con enti e istituzioni di carattere pubblico che privato.
Questo canale YouTube di N&H offre una serie di risorse online per coloro che sono interessati ad approfondire queste tematiche.
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