The question of why people read literature continues to perplex. The usual assumption is that people read for pleasure and, of course, reading is pleasurable. But does this mean it’s like eating chocolate? That doesn’t seem quite the right idea.
Bruner (1986) has argued that narrative is a mode of thinking about agents and their intentions, and how these intentions meet vicissitudes. Court cases—actual and in court-room dramas—have people constructing their own version of the story…
The idea for my book is to explore the fiction as simulation of social worlds, and to treat a small number of works of literature by William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Kate Chopin, Anton Chekhov, James Baldwin from both a literary and a psychological point of view.
In our own time, few writers depict the ambiguities of sexual connection better than Alice Munro. Her stories tend to focus on the relational and the way in which actions of the unconscious, or barely conscious, mind affect others.
In discussing these results, Paul Harris (2000) suggested that it wasn’t literacy as such that had the effect, but whether the respondents were able to use their imagination, as they had as children when they were playing. Introduction to literacy and reading, Harris argued, enabled them to do this…
So far as I can tell, the scientific study of literature (fiction, narrative) began in the early years of the 20th century with two groups of linguists, in Moscow and St Petersburg, who became known—by way of a sneer by the Bolsheviks—as the Formalists. [...] The group’s goal was to study literature as such, scientifically, and not treat it as a species of political moralizing.
In a number of experiments it has been found that people experience pleasure when a liked character behaves well and succeeds. People experience frustration and anxiety when a disliked character behaves badly and succeeds. If, in a thriller with a confusing plot you wonder which character is the real baddie, he’s the one who acts with disdain to an underling.
Within each of us, too, there is a little world—an inner world—and the purpose of that, too, is to reflect the big world. Sometimes a director comes along whose films, by a double reflection, help us understand how our inner world reflects the big world.
In this fascinating book on both novel writing in general and the writing of his own novels in particular, Pamuk devotes his second chapter entirely to how fiction can be be both real and imaginary. From the reader’s point of view, Pamuk takes the idea of the naive to stand for what has been been perceived, in an autobiographical way.
Telepathic communication between minds doesn’t occur, but to me reading a novel by George Eliot or a short story by Anton Chekhov comes close. In a good film, something else occurs: a watching of people with whom one empathizes as they make decisions in pursuit of their goals.
