Empathy and the Strangeness of Fiction: Readings in French Realism

by Maria C. Scott

Overview

Explores how and why narrative fiction engages empathy, including Theory of Mind
Offers a broad overview of current scientific work on the effects of fiction-reading on empathy, including Theory of MindProvides an original intervention in the field of literary theory, centring on the reflexive properties of the fictional strangerIncludes stand-alone close readings of three novels by important French authors

This book studies recent psychological findings which suggest that reading fiction cultivates empathy, encouraging us to be critically reflective, suspicious readers as well as participatory, ‘naïve’ readers. Scott draws on literary theory and close readings to argue that engagement with fictional stories also teaches us to resist uncritical forms of empathy and reminds us of the limitations of our ability to understand other people. The book treats figures of the stranger in Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir and Sand’s Indiana as emblematic of the strangeness of narrative fiction, both drawing us in and keeping us at a distance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474463041
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	03/03/2022
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.51(d)

About the Author

Maria C. Scott is Associate Professor of French Literature and Thought at the University of Exeter. She has published two monographs, Baudelaire’s ‘Le Spleen de Paris’: Shifting Perspectives (Ashgate,2005) and Stendhal’s Less-Loved Heroines: Fiction, Freedom, and the Female (Legenda,2013). The latter was published in French translation as Stendhal, la liberté et les héroïnes mal aimées (Classiques Garnier, 2015).The author is generally interested in the identificatory dynamics and blind spots that can affect literary interpretation.

Table of Contents

1. Does reading fiction boost empathy? Psychological approaches

2. Literary approaches to empathy

3. Fictional strangers and the strangeness of fiction

4. Balzac: the limits of transparency and the dangers of opacity

5. Stendhal and the two opposing demands

6. Sand and the necessity of suspicion

7. Towards an empathetic ethics of fiction-reading

Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

author of The Dark Sides of Empathy and Provost Pr Fritz Breithaupt

Does fiction train us in empathy? Scott’s clever and wonderfully engaging book provides a powerful response to correct the idea of empathy as a simple key to unlock others and instead shows how empathy is a form of seduction. The task of the reader is both to fall for this seduction and to resist it.

Editorial Reviews

Maria C. Scott’s excellent, engaging new book asks what fictional strangers might tell us about readers’ empathy in encounters with fiction. [...] a strangeness so very brilliantly illuminated here by Scott, in this absorbing book abounding with insights for literary and empirical scholars alike.

French Studies - Matt Phillips

In this elegantly written and consistently interesting study of representations of and encounters with strangers in three nineteenth-century French novels—by Balzac, Stendhal, and Sand—Maria C. Scott deploys ideas drawn from the interdisciplinary study of empathy to illuminate the dynamics of fiction reading.

Modern Language Review - Suzanne Keen

Does fiction train us in empathy? Scott’s clever and wonderfully engaging book provides a powerful response to correct the idea of empathy as a simple key to unlock others and instead shows how empathy is a form of seduction. The task of the reader is both to fall for this seduction and to resist it.

Fritz Breithaupt