Question: Is one of our
goals in teaching literature empathy?
Answer: According to
the author, if we think empathizing with characters will produce empathetic
students is a goal of literature study, we are mistaken. Studying literature
cannot produce students who are empathetic. Rather, look to the institutions at
which our students study. Do our institutions reflect an empathetic spirit?
That spirit will be catching and we have a much better chance of sensitizing
students to empathy by example. Reading literature by itself does not produce
empathetic students.
Quote: “If
respectful, thoughtful, and humane ways of being, thinking, and acting are
valued elements of institutional culture, then we will have, at the very least,
created the conditions where students can both be introduced to the complexity
of empathy and experience it as a daily practice.” P. 24.
Comment: In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom says that literature does not exist to alter individuals or
society; that the Canon displays a complex view of humanity; that people read
to enlarge their lonely existence by understanding the complexity of motivation
and point of view in the world, but without didacticism and
moralizing. RayS.
Title: “Empathy and
the Critic.” Ann Jurecic. College English
(September 2011), 10-27.
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