Introduction: Narrative and the Emotions

Abstract

A Look behind Us Seventy-five years ago, a scholar seeking a starting point on narrative and the emotions, the joint subject of this two-part special issue, might have consulted colleagues in psychology and literature departments for a reading list. Quite likely the scholar would have been reminded by those colleagues of the canonical works representing several decades' worth of fruitful collaboration between their disciplines: literary theorist I. A. Richards's Principles of Literary Criticism (1926a) and psychologist John Dewey's Art as Experience (2005 [1934]). Not yet discouraged by the prohibitions of W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's Sewanee Review essay, "The Affective Fallacy," which disparaged work on the elicitation of emotion as "affective relativism" (1954 [1946]: 27); not yet converted to the emergent New Critical canon, which put narrative (especially those lengthy engines of sentimental response, novels) in the shade; not yet fully adopting modern theories of form in preference to older Romantic theories of the imagination (Dissanayake 1992: 142-47); not yet interpellated as either a scientist or a literary intellectual, incapable of communicating across the divide severing the "Two Cultures" (Snow 1956, 1959): our scholar would have every reason to believe that a science of the emotions, including the study of physiological responses, could contribute to an understanding of aesthetic experience. The notion that analysis of the feelings provoked and invited

Real readers reading Wasco’s ‘City’: A storyworld possible selves approach

“…First and foremost, the problem lies in the slippery nature of reader response and engagement itself, which has been the object of intense interdisciplinary study spanning fields as varied as narratology, narrative psychology, psychiatry, neurophysiology, communication studies, cognitive literary linguistics, or education. These studies, further discussed by Martinez (2018: 1–40), unanimously highlight the role of emotion, both derived from empathic attachment to characters (Keen, 2011), where empathy is understood as ‘feeling the same as the other’ (Miall and Kuiken, 2002: 223), and from fresh emotions , or emotions not shared with any of the characters (Miall and Kuiken, 2002). Furthermore, these emotional responses are found to be strongly idiosyncratic (Holland, 2009; Miall and Kuiken, 2002), as they are derived from feelings of personal relevance (Kuzmičová and Bálint, 2019) and of resonance , or memory recall (Seilman and Larsen, 1989).…”

“Never Give Up Hopelessness!?”: Emotions and Spatiality in Contemporary Finnish Experimental Poetry

“…Today, the theoretical toolbox available for analyzing literature, emotions, and affects is more than well stocked. There are several central concepts such as affect, emotion, feeling, and sentiment, among others, and a multiplicity of ways for defining them (e.g., Helle and Hollsten 2016;Seighworth and Gregg 2010;Nussbaum 2001, 22-3;Keen 2011;Deleuze 2012, 63;Massumi 2002;Ahmed 2004;Ngai 2005). In this chapter, I use the concept of emotion to refer to different kinds of human sentiments, or to feeling something in relation to other people, thoughts, or situations.…”

Narrative empathy and illness memoirs: Arthur Frank'sAt the Will of the Bodyand Kathlyn Conway'sOrdinary Life

“…Given that different literary genres raise different expectations in readers,24 we can rightly state that generic choices play a definite role in inviting readers' empathic responses 25. In fact, genres are considered as ‘affect-producing templates’ 26. Specifically, the genre of autobiography itself calls out for some level of intimacy between reader and writer: telling stories about ourselves presupposes a certain amount of intimate sharing with an audience, and that intimacy ‘can prepare the way for a reader's empathetic response to the autobiographer or to others within her narrative’ 27.…”