Relatable: Empathy, Novels, and Picky Readers

Join us for Relatable: Empathy, Novels, and Picky Readers, a talk with Suzanne Keen as part of the CMU Humanities Festival. 

This lecture centers on narrative empathy: the capacity of narrative fiction to invite readers into unfamiliar worlds, where they can be asked to share the imagined experiences, perspectives, and emotions of characters and other storyworld elements, where they may even be coaxed into identifying with persons radically different from themselves, overcoming the ordinary barriers of distance, dissimilarity, and unfamiliarity. Narrative fiction has the ability to evoke empathy. By definition, a work that inspires narrative empathy is, at least temporarily, “relatable.”  But what’s going on when students deem a novel “relatable,” or worse, “unrelatable”?