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Narrative as Experience: The Pedagogical Implications of Sympathizing with Fictional Characters

Abstract:

Last year, guided by theories that regard sympathy as an imaginative capacity that can bridge divisions between people of different backgrounds, I conducted an experiment with nearly 200 Finnish secondary school students, in order to determine the extent to which particular texts would generate their sympathy for characters who seem unattractive, undesirable, or generally outside of the accepted norms of the societies in which they live. The present paper builds on my findings in that study by suggesting some of the pedagogical implications of providing adolescents with opportunities to engage with the lives of fictional characters, and particularly to experience feelings of sympathy for individuals toward whom they ordinarily might feel aversion or uncertainty. It examines some of the ways in which experiences with narrative fiction can be used to help develop emotional and conceptual structures in adolescent readers. In Education and Experience John Dewey contends that “the conditions found in present experience should be used as sources of problems”; indeed, the present paper shows how narrative experience can help form the basis for a problem-solving, emotionally-rich curriculum that takes as its primary aim the development of students’ capacities for emotional awareness and ethical reflection.

 

June 2008: Howard Sklar is a doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Helsinki, Finland. The working title for his dissertation is The Art of Sympathy: Forms of Moral and Emotional Persuasion in Fiction.  His essay “Believable Fictions: The Moral Implications of Story-Based Emotions” appeared in the collection Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice (Helsinki University Press, 2005). His essay on the structure of sympathy in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath will appear in Dialogue: The Grapes of Wrath (Rodopi 2009). Sklar recently taught “Fiction, Ethics and the Significance of Reading,” a course offered through the departments of English, Aesthetics and Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki.  In addition to his university-related work, Sklar teaches English in the public schools of Espoo, Finland.  He has been a secondary-school English teacher, in the United States or in Finland, since 1987. He can be reached at howard.sklar@helsinki.fi.

 

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 04/17/2020