Enhancing Physician Empathy: Optimizing Learner Potential for Narrative Transportation

This article argues for the pedagogical usefulness of engaging with literary texts in the formal training of physicians and healthcare workers. It suggests that particular “skills” in reading and engaging with narrative are as readily teachable to healthcare students as are skills in reading x-rays or in diagnosing symptoms. It focuses on three phenomena associated with literary (and other forms) of narrative – namely, the recognition of characters, vicarious experience, and the experience of fellow feeling – and relates them to three categories in cognitive psychology: Theory of Mind, Narrative Transportation, and Empathy. It presents a survey of empirical studies in cognitive psychology that demonstrates the effectiveness of literary narrative in producing these psychological states, and ends by demonstrating how the teaching of a literary narrative – Bastard Out of Carolina – has enhanced these states in students planning on a career in medicine. Such enhancement, the article suggests, are produced by literary features such as imagery, defamiliarization, and patterned organization on the levels of phonology, semantics, and story structure

Literature and Medicine

Literature and Medicine: A Practical and Pedagogical Guide is a book that grows out of more than 18  years of teaching and collaboration between the authors, Professor Ronald Schleifer, a George Lynn Cross Distinguished Research Professor of twentieth-century literature and culture, literary aesthetics, and semiotics at the University of Oklahoma, and Dr. Jerry Vannatta, a David Ross Boyd Professor of Internal Medicine (retired), former Executive Dean of the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine with a long career as a practicing physician, a researcher, and an award-winning classroom professor. The goals for this book—as they have been for authors’ classes for pre-med and medical students, and for their workshops for practicing physicians and healthcare professionals—are very specific. They are: • To help develop in physicians and healthcare professionals through the study of literature and narrative habits of attentive listening with the patients and others with whom they work. Among other things, these forms of attention will contribute to more precise and more efficient understandings of the medical conditions and personal concerns that brought the patient to the healthcare provider, which, in turn, will lead to more accurate diagnoses on the part of physicians and healthcare providers. • To help develop in physicians and healthcare professionals through the study of literature and narrative habits of responsive engagement with their patients. Among other things, these forms of interaction will lead to a greater sense of empathy on the part of healthcare providers, a greater commitment to treatment plans on the part of patients, and a greater sense of satisfaction on the parts of both patients and healthcare providers. • To help develop in physicians and healthcare professionals through the study of literature and narrative habits of critical thinking. Among other things, these forms of reflection will lead to everyday behaviors that will create a greater sense of professionalism and a more habitual practice of basic ethical responses such as simple decency and good will

Three (Potential) Pillars of Transnational Economic Justice: The Bretton Woods Institutions as Guarantors of Global Equal Treatment and Market Completion

This essay aims to bring two important lines of inquiry and criticism together. It first lays out an institutionally enriched account of what a just world economic order will look like. That account prescribes, via the requisites to that mechanism which most directly instantiate the account, three realms of equal treatment and market completion - the global products, services, and labor markets; the global investment/financial markets; and the global preparticipation opportunity allocation. The essay then suggests how, with minimal if any departure from familiar canons of traditional international legal mandate interpretation, each of the Bretton Woods institutions - particularly the GATT/WTO and the IMF - can be viewed at least in part as charged with the task of fostering equal treatment and ultimate market completion within one of those three realms. The piece then argues that one of the institutions in particular - the World Bank - has, for reasons of at best negligent and at worst willful injustice on the part of influential state actors in the world community, fallen farthest short in pursuit of what should be viewed as its proper mandate. The article accordingly concludes that a fuller empowerment of the Bank to effect its ideal mission will press the Bretton Woods system more nearly into ethical balance, and with it the world into justice; and that full empowerment of the GATT/WTO and IMF should be partly conditioned upon the fuller empowerment of the Bank

Modernism as Gesture: The Experience of Music, Samuel Beckett, and Performed Bewilderment

This paper examines gesture in music and literature—it presents a “theory of gesture”—culminating in a close analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Not I in the contexts of psychology and neurology. It examines gesture in relation to music, free indirect discourse in literary texts (with Joyce as example), speech-act theory, and Beckett’s play as it was performed for television. In the course of its argument, it analyzes the neurobiology of gesture and signaling—from studies in cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, and semiotics—in the context of what Colin MacCabe, following Eugene Jolas, calls “the revolution of the word” in literary modernism. In its detailed argument, it focuses on the “performativity” of modernist literary arts by examining literary texts—from Joyce and Beckett—in relation to gestures in music, and especially the performative gestures of popular musical performance

THE INSTITUTIONS OF CULTURAL STUDIES

An account of the disciplinary problematic of cultureal studies. How does a theoretical and analytic enterprise take on an institutional form? Special reference to the establishment of a program in cultural studies at the University of Oklahoma.Une réflexion sur la problématique disciplinaire de l’analyse des pratiques culturelles. Les modalités de l’institutionnalisation d’une entreprise théorique et analytique. Mise en évidence de l’établissement d’un programme en cultural studies à l’Université d’Oklahoma

Literary Studies and Well-Being Structures of Experience in the Worldly Work of Literature and Healthcare

The literary arts represent and provoke experiences of understanding and emotion, and this open access study examines how the practical pursuit of well-being in healthcare reveals purposes at the core of our engagements with and understanding of literature itself. During the past twenty years, much admirable work in the “health humanities” has focused upon what studies of literature contribute to the understandings and the practical work—the “worldly work”—of healthcare. Such a project aims at developing healthcare practitioners who bring greater care to those who come to them ailing or in fear or faced with terrible suffering. Literary Studies and Well-Being turns this inside out by examining the intergenerational caretaking of healthcare in a manner which allows us to comprehend the nature and discipline of literary studies in new ways.Open access was funded by The University of Oklahoma.Ye