Ethical challenges when reading aesthetic rape scenes

Both the issue of the ethics of representation and the issue of the ethics of reading are particularly important when it comes to representations of suffering and violence. This chapter addresses the ethics of representing and the ethics of reading rape, with a focus on the latter. Depictions of rape are interesting study objects because the extreme situation of rape simultaneously evokes cultural scripts of sexual fantasies and lies in the domain of taboos and crime. Through those kinds of representations, readers are confronted with what they would rather not see, or would like to see but are ashamed to admit. Issues of voyeurism and sadism in relating to the fictional suffering other thus become particularly important with representations of rape. I engage with these issues by using Dominick LaCapra’s concept of ‘empathic unsettlement,’ a term he uses to stress both the importance of being able to empathize with the suffering other and of being able to understand that there is a difference between oneself and the represented other. Both empathy and unsettlement are reader responses that can be triggered by the features of literary texts. Two case studies – Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place and Reve's Een Circusjongen – will serve to illustrate how distance and proximity are fundamental dynamics in an ethical reader response to representations of suffering

Incestuous rape, abjection, and the colonization of psychic space in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) both apply a strategy of connecting rape to other forms of oppression, suggesting that incest is at least partly the result of the dynamics of being colonized and “othered”. This article brings out the problematics of closely associating colonization and (incestuous) rape by exploring the associations made in these two novels. It uses Kelly Oliver’s concept of “the colonization of psychic space” to argue that the novels demonstrate that without a positive space of meaning, victims of racial oppression and of sexual violence find themselves among the abjected. The close association made between colonization and incest is criticized for ignoring the specificity of the processes by which incest and rape function to make one feel abjected

Hoe lezers lijden lezen. Een casus uit de empirische esthetica

Wat hebben literatuur en psychologie elkaar vandaag de dag nog te bieden, nu wij niet langer met Freud alle ve

Reader responses to literary depictions of rape

This study explored reader responses to different literary depictions of rape. Four literary excerpts were used and divided as aesthetic versus nonaesthetic (style) and allusive versus explicit (detail). The general question was how readers would react to literary fragments depicting rape and whether the level of aesthetics and the level of explicitness influenced readers' thoughts and feelings. An open-ended question asked readers to report how the style had influenced their thoughts and feelings, whereas 7-point scales addressed the following variables: experienced distance, perceptions of realism and of beauty, emotional versus intellectual reaction, empathy, tension, and arousal. In a 2 (detail: explicit vs. allusive) × 2 (style: aesthetic vs. nonaesthetic) within-participant design (N = 34), gender functioned as a between-participants variable. Results indicate that the personal tendency to feel engaged with fiction overrides effects of aesthetics and explicitness. Principal-components factor analysis suggests that readers who are easily engaged with the characters feel unsettled when reading rape scenes they find brutal and intellectualize to handle these feelings. These “high empathizers” are not likely to be detached or to appreciate the fragment negatively: once absorbed, they will try to take something positive even from an unsettling experience

What Might Have Been Lost

This article examines the role of “independent” folk music (indie-folk) in personal identity formation. It builds upon Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity, which argues (i) that it is through the mechanism of narrative that people build a more or less coherent life-story, and (ii) emphasizes the role of art (most notably literary fiction and poetry) as a mediator in the comprehension and regulation of transitory life experiences. This article aims to apply these insights to studying the role of indie-folk, a narrative art form adhering to the traditional understanding of folk music as a genre rooted in oral tradition, in the construction of personal identity. Studying the daily use of indie-folk songs by audience members through in-depth interviewing, it shows that (i) the reception of indie-folk music results in ritualistic listening behavior aimed at coping with the experience of accelerating social time; (ii) that respondents use indie-folk narratives as resources for reading the self, and (iii) that indie-folk songs provide healing images that are effective in coping with the experience of narrated time as discordant. In arguing for the central role of narrative in identity formation, this article aims to contribute to existing research on music as a “technology of the self” (DeNora). It specifically emphasizes how narrative particles are tools and building blocks in identity construction, a process characterized by the oscillation between narrative coherence and disruption

Effects of Literature on Empathy and Self- Reflection : A Theoretical-Empirical Framework

Various scholars have made claims about literature’s potential to evoke empathy and self-reflection, which would eventually lead to more pro-social behavior. But is it indeed the case that a seemingly idle pass-time activity like literary reading can do all that? And if so, how can we explain such an influence? Would the effects be particular to unique literary text qualities or to other aspects that literary texts share with other genres (e.?g., narrativity)? Empirical research is necessary to answer these questions. This article presents an overview of empirical studies investigating the relationship between reading and empathy, and reading and self-reflection. We reveal those questions in the research that are not addressed as of yet, and synthesize the available approaches to literary effects. Based on theory as well as empirical work, a multi-factor model of literary reading is constructed. With regard to reading and empathy, the metaphor of the moral laboratory (cf. Hakemulder 2000) comes close to a concise summary of the research and theory. Being absorbed in a narrative can stimulate empathic imagination. Readers go along with the author/narrator in a (fictional) thought-experiment, imagining how it would be to be in the shoes of a particular character, with certain motives, under certain circumstances, meeting with certain events. That would explain why narrativity can result in a broadening of readers’ consciousness, in particular so that it encompasses fellow human beings. Fictionality might stimulate readers to consider the narrative they read as a thought experiment, creating distance between them and the events, allowing them to experiment more freely with taking the position of a character different from themselves, also in moral respects. Literary features, like gaps and ambiguous characterization, may stimulate readers to make more mental inferences, thus training their theory of mind. However, apart from literature possibly being able to train basic cognitive ability, we have little indication for the importance of literary imagination over narrative or fictional imagination. Regarding self-reflection, while there is no convincing evidence that literary texts are generally more thought-provoking than non-literary texts (either narrative or expository), there is tentative indication for a relation between reading literary texts and self-reflection. However, as was the case for the studies on empathy, there is a lack of systematic comparisons between literary narratives and non-literary narratives. There are some suggestions regarding the processes that can lead to self-reflection. Empirical and theoretical work indicates that the combination of experiencing narrative and aesthetic emotions tends to trigger self-reflection. Personal and reading experience may influence narrative and aesthetic emotions. By proposing a multi-factor model of literary reading, we hope to give an impulse to current reader response research, which too often conflates narrativity, fictionality and literariness. The multi-factor model of literary reading contains (our simplified versions of) two theoretical positions within the field of reader response studies on underlying processes that lead to empathy and reflection: the idea of reading literature as a form of role-taking proposed by Oatley (e.?g., 1994; 1999) and the idea of defamiliarization through deviating textual and narrative features proposed by Miall and Kuiken (1994; 1999). We argue that these positions are in fact complementary. While the role-taking concept seems most adequate to explain empathic responses, the defamiliarization concept seems most adequate in explaining reflective responses. The discussion of these two theoretical explanations leads to the construction of a theoretical framework (and model) that offers useful suggestions which texts could be considered to have which effects on empathy and reflection. In our multi-factor model of literary reading, an important addition to the previously mentioned theories is the concept »stillness«. We borrow this term from the Canadian author Yann Martel (2009), who suggests reading certain literary texts will help to stimulate self-contemplation (and appreciation for art), moments that are especially valuable in times that life seems to be racing by, and we are enveloped by work and a multitude of other activities. Other literary authors have proposed similar ideas. Stillness is related to, or overlaps with the more commonly used term »aesthetic distance«, an attitude of detachment, allowing for contemplation to take place (cf. Cupchik 2001). Stillness, we propose, allows a space in which slow thinking (Kahneman 2011) can take place. Stillness is not reflection itself, but a precondition for reflection. In our model, stillness is an empty space or time that is created as a result of reading processes: the slowing down of readers’ perceptions of the fictional world, caused by defamiliarization. Our multi-factor model suggests that while role-taking can take place for all types of narratives, literary and fictional narratives may evoke the type of aesthetic distance (stillness) that leads to a suspension of judgment, adding to a stronger experience of role-taking and narrative empathy