Soon after the beginning of each movie, and again at the end, all the viewers rated their liking for the protagonist and for the antagonist. Each film was stopped at 12 different times. In another recent psychological study, Tom Trabasso and Jennifer Chung asked 20 viewers to watch two films, Blade Runner and Vertigo. Our fondness for fiction shows that we enjoy feeling with other people, even when sometimes the feelings are negative. That will ring true for anyone who’s ever been caught up in a play, book, or movie-anyone who has wept for the young lovers in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, or with the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, or with those who have suffered in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. They argue that their results show that the empathic response that we feel for someone we know and like is the same as the emotional aspect we feel ourselves. Singer and her colleagues describe this dual activation as the emotional aspect of pain. In some parts of the volunteers’ brains, activation occurred only when they themselves received a shock, but other parts associated with feeling pain were activated both when the volunteers received a shock and when they knew their loved one was getting a shock. Singer and her colleagues administered electric shocks to volunteers and also gave these volunteers signals when a loved one, present in the next room, was being shocked. In a recent study using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans of brain activity, Tania Singer and her colleagues showed that a basis for empathy can be identified in the brain. How does this happen? How can an artificial world conjure up such real emotions, and what mental capacities do we engage in order to feel those emotions? Brilliant though Aristotle was, his Poetics is curiously silent on this question, as is much of the canon of Western literary theory that followed him.īut other traditions-one of Western psychology, one of Eastern literature-can help shed light on how fiction elicits such empathic responses from us.Įmpathy can be thought of as feeling with someone, or for them. The emotions that you experience as you breathe life into a story are related to the characters, but they are not the characters’ emotions. The author writes it, and the reader or audience member brings it alive. What a good story does, by means of black marks on the white pages of a novel, or by the actions of a small group of people several yards away on a stage, or by the flickering images on a screen, is to offer the materials-a kind of kit-to start up and run the dream of the story world on your mind. Shakespeare likened this to the way we dream, such as when Prospero, the protagonist in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, says that humans “are such stuff as dreams are made on.” Dream is an apt metaphor because, when we dream, without any input from eyes or ears, we create worlds of places, people, and emotions. In other words, Aristotle thought that great plays, such as the tragedies of Sophocles, which he discussed in Poetics, created worlds of the imagination. While literary art can serve to imitate the world-what Hamlet called holding “the mirror up to nature”-it can also create new worlds. If you read an English translation, you will see the Greek word mimesis indicated by translations like “copying,” “imitation,” or “representation.” These translations get it half right. This term can be interpreted in two ways. The central term in Poetics is mimesis, the relation of the story to the way the world works. More broadly it was what we now call fiction, which, like poetry, means “something made.” Aristotle said that whereas history lets us know what has happened, poetry (fiction) is more important because it is about what can happen. The subject matter of his book was not just poetry. In the West, the tradition of understanding literature derives from Aristotle who, nearly 2,400 years ago, wrote a book called Poetics. From the GGSC to your bookshelf: 30 science-backed tools for well-being.
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