Abstract
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.
Zusammenfassung
Dieser 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.
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Literature
Narratological model-building as an enterprise encompasses diverse theoretical endeavors. Early theorizing of the grammar of events internal to the story include the classic contributions of Vladimir Propp and A.J. Greimas. See Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale, trans, by Laurence Scott, Austin 1968
and A.J. Greimas, »Actants, Actors, and Figures« (1973), in: On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins (trans.), Minneapolis 1987, 106–120.
Structuralist narratology offers taxonomies of narrative level, specifying roles to be played by different kinds of narrators and their narratees. Canonically, see Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method (1972), Jane E. Lewin (trans.), Ithaca 1980.
For a model of the structure of narrative communication, from real and implied authors to implied and real readers, see the standard description in: Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca 1978.
See Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading, Bloomington 1985, for discussion of variable implied readers (of the Bible).
An influential alternative model for narrative communication is offered by Monika Fludernik, in: Towards a Natural Narratology, London, New York 1996.
Rhetorical approaches to narrative as communication (also known as the Chicago School), the tradition I follow and augment in this essay, begin with Wayne C. Booth’s seminal The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), revised 2nd edition, Chicago 1983
and Booth’s The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Berkeley 1988.
Recent practitioners of rhetorical narratology include James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, upon whose models of narrative and authorial audience I rely. See James Phelan, Experiencing Fiction: judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative, Columbus, OH 2007
and Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation, Ithaca, London 1987.
See Suzanne Keen, »A Theory of Narrative Empathy«, Narrative 13 (2006), 207–236
and Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel, Oxford, New York 2007.
See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, »Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiog raphy« (1985), in: Donna Landry, Gerald MacLean (eds.), The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, New York 1996, 203–235, here 214.
Spivak’s strategic essentializing has inspired other coiners of terms, including Graham Huggan, who describes postcolonial writers’ strategic exoticism, by means of which they manipulate and subvert the codes of exoticising representation. See Graham Huggan, The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, London, New York 2001, 28–33, 40–50. My term, strategic empathizing, supplements rather than confutes Huggan’s strategic exoticism, by means of which postcolonial writers meet and manipulate the tourisitic gaze of the global literature consumer.
For a variety of studies of success in human perspective-taking, see William Ickes, editor, Empathie Accuracy, New York, London 1997.
On anti-empathetic negative affect in narrative fiction, see Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings, Cambridge, MA 2005.
See Peter J. Rabinowitz (note 3) and two essays by Brian Richardson, »The Other Reader’s Response: On Multiple, Divided, and Oppositional Audiences«, Criticism 39/1 (Winter 1997), 31–53, and »Singular Text, Multiple Implied Readers«, Style 41 (2007), 259–274. Rabinowitz and Richardson offer subtle ways of understanding the various audiences narrative fiction may simultaneously address, and the conditions that pertain when we choose to join them.
On »structure of feeling«, those »specifically affective elements of consciousness« that capture social meanings and values as they are lived and felt in the moment, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford 1977, 132–134.
See Opal Palmer Adisa, It Begins with Tears, Oxford, Portsmouth, NH 1997, 131–137.
On Anand’s life, see Marlene Fisher, The Wisdom of the Heart: a Study of the Works of Mulk Raj Anand, New Delhi 1985.
Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable, 1935, rpt. Harmondsworth 1986, 46–49.
Hayden M. Williams, review of So Many Freedoms: A Study of the Major Fiction of Mulk Raj Anand, by Saros Cowasje, The Journal of Asian Studies 39 (1980), 411–412, here 412.
Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy, Orlando 1992, 281–283.
Gregory S. Jackson, » >What would Jesus do?<: Practical Christianity, Social Gospel Realism, and the Homiletic Novel«, PMLA 121 (2006), 641–661, here 642.
Keen, Empathy and the Novel (note 4), xii–xiv, 4, 69, 168. For a theoretical elaboration of the nature of fictionality as an interpretive frame conditioning readers’ comprehension, see Richard Walsh, The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction, Columbus, OH 2007, 44–45.
Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying, New York 1993, 83.
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia 1960.
See Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace, Houndmills 2007, 4, 176.
Ngugi wa Thiongo, »The Language of African Literature«, in: Decolonising the Mind, London 1986, 4–33, here 15.
Ngugi wa Thiongo, Wizard of the Crow, New York 2006, 40.
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Keen, S. Strategic Empathizing: Techniques of Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Narrative Empathy. Dtsch Vierteljahrsschr Literaturwiss Geistesgesch 82, 477–493 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374712
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374712