Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions

Abstract

There is still little consensus among scholars has not yet been brought to bear on the philoregarding how best to characterize the relationsophical debate regarding readers' relationship between readers of fictional narratives and ships to fictional characters. In this section, I the characters in those narratives.' Part of the discuss several studies that examine the activproblem is that many of the explanatory ities involved in narrative comprehension. This concepts used in the debate-concepts like research provides an important source of empiridentification and empathy-are somewhat ical support for the claim that adopting the vague or ambiguous. In this article, I consider perspective of fictional characters typically some recent relevant empirical research on text plays an important part in our engagement with processing and narrative comprehension and narratives. argue for a pluralist account of character Several recent empirical studies indicate that engagement, in which empathy plays an importreaders tend to adopt a position within the spatioant role. In Section I, I review several empirical temporal framework of narratives that is based studies that strongly suggest that readers often on the position of the protagonist.2 In a repreadopt the perspective of one or more of the sentative study, Rinck and Bower ran a series of characters in fictional narratives. In Section II, experiments on the focus of readers' attention.3 I turn to the concept of empathy and provide an They had readers memorize the diagram of a explanation of empathy based on models and building and objects located within it. Readers research in empirical psychology. I focus in then read narratives describing characters' activparticular on self-other differentiation, a critical ities and movements in that building. While feature of empathy that has been underemphareading, they were probed with target sentences sized in the literature. Next I discuss two referring to memorized objects within the buildpsychological phenomena that are closely ing's rooms. The consistent finding was that related to empathy and often confused or readers were able to process the target sentences conflated with it: emotional contagion and describing objects close to the current location sympathy. In the final section of the paper, I of the protagonist much faster than target senemploy the account of empathy developed in tences describing objects that were farther away Section II to address Noel Carroll's objections from the protagonist or that had been visited by to the view that readers typically empathize the protagonist earlier in the narrative. Based on with fictional characters. this finding, Rinck and Bower concluded that readers were experiencing the narrative from the spatiotemporal standpoint of the protagonist. In