Does Fiction Reading Make Us Better People? Empathy and Morality in a Literary Empowerment Programme

ABSTRACT

Studies have proposed that participatory arts, particularly literature reading, enhance empathy, supposedly leading to enhanced moral judgment. Building on fieldwork in a Literary Empowerment Programme for people with mental vulnerabilities in Denmark, I seek to qualify the role of empathy, the ability to imaginatively put yourself in other people’s shoes, when reading literature in a social setting. I describe encounters with empathy and the limits thereof, as it happened in the reading groups investigated. Taking inspiration from Jarrett Zigon, these encounters are situated within the moral and ethical assemblage of the programme, whose objective was to create ‘literary free spaces’. I connect this objective to Scandinavian and Scottish Enlightenment values of freedom, equality and civil society. These insights are finally used to discuss future pathways for the anthropology of literature and reading, moving beyond a focus on understanding and meaning-making processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Reading
• literature
• morality
• Denmark
• empathy

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank all actors in and around the literary empowerment programme for so generously sharing their experiences and reflections with me. I would like to thank Anders Sybrandt Hansen and my co-researcher and supervisor Anne Line Dalsgård for comments on previous drafts that helped me strengthen the argument. I also wish to thank the editors of Ethnos and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments and suggestions. This article is based on research that adheres to Aarhus University’s ethical guidelines and Danish law regarding responsible conduct of research. The research project has been registered in Aarhus University’s Data Protection Unit.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All names are pseudonyms. Some interlocutors and situations have been further ‘scrambled’ in order to secure their anonymity.

2 All translations from Danish are done by the author.

3 In connection with DRS editing an anthology of texts.

4 The exercises were also supplemented by 1:1 follow-up talks with each course participant that I did not participate in.

Additional information

Funding

This article is based on research made possible by support from the Velux Foundation's HUMpraxis-programme [grant number 18215]; and Aarhus University.