Abstract
As we saw in the last chapter, understanding application makes it clearer how literature can have cognitive value. However, many would maintain that the satisfactions that literature has to offer are mostly emotional and cannot be explained through references to mechanisms like application. They would adopt the virtual-reality view, arguing that readers come into close contact with the world of the text and experience it vividly and that such affective interaction with the literary content is crucial for literature’s effects on its readers.
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Notes
“Someone (‘the traveler’) is transported, by some means of transportation, as a result of performing certain actions. The traveler goes some distance from his or her world of origin, which makes some aspects of the world of origin inaccessible. The traveler returns to the world of origin, somewhat changed by the journey.” Richard J. Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 10–11.
My discussion of the theory here is mainly based on two contributions from the Gerrig camp and two articles by Green and Brock: Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds; Richard J. Gerrig and David N. Rapp, “Psychological Processes Underlying Literary Impact”, Poetics Today 25 (2004), pp. 265–81;
Melanie C. Green and Timothy C. Brock, “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79 (2000), pp. 701–21;
Melanie C. Green and Timothy C. Brock, “In the Mind’s Eye: Transportation-Imagery Model of Narrative Persuasion”, in Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, ed. Melanie C. Green, Jeffrey J. Strange, and Timothy C. Brock (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), pp. 315–41. In what follows, “Gerrig” should often be read as short for “Gerrig and his various associates”.
Daniel T. Gilbert, “How Mental Systems Believe”, American Psychologist 46 (1991), pp. 107–19.
“Murder at the Mall” is an adaptation by Brock and Green of a non-fiction story from Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die (New York: Knopf, 1994). See Green and Brock, “The Role of Transportation”, pp. 703–4 and 705.
Cf. Jeffrey Strange’s criticism of Gerrig’s application of Gilbert, a criticism which partly differs from, partly parallels, and partly supplements my reflections in the following: Jeffrey J. Strange, “How Fictional Tales Wag Real-World Beliefs: Models and Mechanisms of Narrative Influence”, in Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, ed. Melanie C. Green, Jeffrey J. Strange, and Timothy C. Brock (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), pp. 263–86; here, pp. 274–75.
Katharine Everett Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn, A History of Esthetics, revised and enlarged edn (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), p. 537; “Einfühlung”, in Der grosse Brockhaus, 16th, completely newly revised ed., vol. 3 (Wiesbaden: F.A. Brockhaus, 1953), p. 454;
Lauren Wispè, “History of the Concept of Empathy”, in Empathy and Its Development, ed. Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 17–37;
Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, “Introduction”, in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. ix–xlvii, esp. pp. x–xxxi.
Amy Coplan, “Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2004), pp. 141–52; here, p. 143.
Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 5.
Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon, Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 174.
In a later contribution, where she does not discuss empathy in literary contexts specifically, Coplan defines empathy as “a complex imaginative process in which an observer simulates another person’s situated psychological states while maintaing clear self-other differentiation”: Amy Coplan, “Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects”, in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 3–18; here, p. 5. Coplan stresses that the observer’s emotions must be “qualitatively identical” to the other person’s (p. 6), so that “mere qualitative similarity” (p. 7) will not be enough, and it seems that her later, refined definition would encounter the same difficulties as her 2004 definition if applied to fictional characters.
Lady Macbeth says that she has “given suck” (Macbeth I.vii.54), but that is all we know. Via L.C. Knights’ ironic question in the title of his book How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism (Cambridge: G. Fraser, The Minority Press, 1933), the formulation has become classic. Cf. John Britton, “A. C. Bradley and Those Children of Lady Macbeth”, Shakespeare Quarterly 12 (1961), pp. 349–51.
I am thinking particularly of Amanda Lueders’ description of her empathy with Jimmy/Snowman in Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake (2003) — see Keen, p. 71 and p. 191, note 15. I take this as a case where the reader notices the realism of something in a text with recognition (cf. what is said about “shallow application” in Chapter 2).
Similarly, David S. Miall hypothesizes that “among any survey of the reasons why we value literary works, we might expect to find that empathy has a prominent place, perhaps even the most important”. David S. Miall, “Enacting the Other: Towards an Aesthetics of Feeling in Literary Reading”, in The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology, ed. Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 285–98; here, p. 285.
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© 2012 Anders Pettersson
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Pettersson, A. (2012). Transportation and Empathy. In: The Concept of Literary Application. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035424_5
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