Foreword: Empathy and Life Writing

Foreword: Empathy and Life Writing

Empathy, as a process within and product of literary works, has become an increasingly salient topic of discussion. The notion of literary texts as cultural artifacts that allow readers to identify, comprehend, and relate to the experiences and feelings of others—affectively and cognitively—compels us to consider these narratives’ discursive possibilities. The issue of empathy in literary texts has been highlighted in forums as diverse as David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano’s 2013 article in the journal Science, where they posit that reading fiction improves theory of mind, to Barack Obama’s interview with Marilyn Robinson in the New York Review of Books. In that interview, the President tells Robinson that “the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen . . . I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with . . . the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.” Crucially, Suzanne Keen’s groundbreaking study, Empathy and the Novel, comprehensively and empirically explores narrative empathy by examining how it is created in fiction, as well as the effects it produces—whether reading moves beyond feeling to altruistic action. In a time of heightened valency of emotional cultures in the context of civil society, media and popular culture, art and politics, the notion and practice of empathy has become a fundamental element in our understanding of and negotiation with texts. This idea arises from the apparently general consensus that the reading of literary texts promotes empathy, a situation that ideally leads to the creation of a more compassionate society.