Suzanne Keen

Untitled

Date

2016-09-??

Authors

Suzanne Keen

Publisher

英語學系
Department of English, NTNU

Abstract

This essay revisits Suzanne Keen’s claim in Empathy and the Novel (2007) that writing perceived as fictional is especially effective at evoking readers’ empathy. Building on her discussion of narrative nonfiction in Narrative Form (2015) and her prior theorization of narrative empathy, the essay proposes that we should see life writing as a special category of nonfiction that shares with fictional narratives the capacity to invite feeling responses and to evoke readers’ empathy. The distinctiveness of life writing as a mode of nonfiction has infrequently qualified the conclusions of empirical comparisons of the impact of fiction and nonfiction on readers. In an attempt to redress the neglect of life writing in empirical research programs investigating the fiction/nonfiction contrast in narrative empathy, the essay theorizes how strategic narrative empathy might work in a nonfictional context and poses questions for future study.