tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54552773889006379282024-03-19T02:14:33.493-04:00OnFictionKeith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.comBlogger692125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-81748385433670666982024-02-07T04:19:00.005-05:002024-02-07T04:19:57.501-05:00Research Bulletin: Does Reading Foster Morality or Lead to Moral Erosion?<p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1BcwgN2_7nJrC2DA1XiSgZpQYweu43f5dsEQwUytarN4IPluyzdl32wEAHa2pkaPPSADUeeYtDzjPjH1Pt1W8fh7aSLfCuZ3lQ8UY_-dDDXQ202RRfd7jAM-Pu56YueO0RkkN9hXBLDvQ6sW40Dz-defg0HFOtj2exaE4pf8FOoOB3jK1_htLJsTdRCw/s3664/pexels-yaroslav-shuraev-9490506.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3664" data-original-width="2443" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1BcwgN2_7nJrC2DA1XiSgZpQYweu43f5dsEQwUytarN4IPluyzdl32wEAHa2pkaPPSADUeeYtDzjPjH1Pt1W8fh7aSLfCuZ3lQ8UY_-dDDXQ202RRfd7jAM-Pu56YueO0RkkN9hXBLDvQ6sW40Dz-defg0HFOtj2exaE4pf8FOoOB3jK1_htLJsTdRCw/w133-h200/pexels-yaroslav-shuraev-9490506.jpg" width="133" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The effect of reading on a person’s morality has been a topic of debate for decades, with people raising arguments that it either helps or hinders moral development. Two competing theories argue that fiction either promotes morality by increasing empathy (i.e., fiction as moral laboratory), or that exposure to fiction that portrays deviations from real-world morality increases acceptance of “immoral” things (i.e., moral boundary erosion). To better understand which of the two theories is most likely true, Black and Barnes (2021) investigated the relationship between literature consumption (i.e., non-fiction, adult fiction, and young adult fiction) and individual differences in morality. Across two cross-sectional studies, undergraduates were given measures of empathy, morality, and moral permissibility, as well as measures of exposure to adult fiction, young adult fiction, and non-fiction. If fiction acts as a moral laboratory, there should be positive associations between fiction exposure and both empathy and morality. Conversely, if the theory of moral boundary erosion is true, there will be an association between exposure to different types of literature and moral permissibility. Across both studies, fiction exposure predicted empathy and morality, which offers support for the theory of fiction as a moral laboratory. They also found that reading both fiction and nonfiction was associated with greater moral permissibility, lending support to the theory of moral boundary erosion. Findings regarding the different types of fiction (i.e., adult fiction and young adult fiction) were inconsistent across studies and small in size, and therefore difficult to interpret. Overall, the findings suggest that the association between reading and morality is complex and multi-faceted, and that more research on this topic is required in order to further understand how, and why, the two are related.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />Black, J. E., & Barnes, J. L. (2021). Fiction and morality: Investigating the associations between reading exposure, empathy, morality, and moral judgment. Psychology of Popular Media, 10(2), 149–164. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000281<br /></div><div></div><div> </div><div>Post by Shyamaly Vasuthevan<br /><br />Photo by <a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-of-an-eaten-apple-on-top-of-a-pile-of-books-9490506/" target="_blank">Yaroslav Shuraev</a> via Pexels.</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><br /><!--AddThis Button BEGIN-->
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<!--AddThis Button END--></div>Raymond A. Marhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07521492403638340957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-19994179317195073412023-12-13T12:43:00.001-05:002023-12-13T12:43:32.730-05:00Research Bulletin: Who Is More Likely To Help You In A Video Game? <div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoh6WTmthdcw2O1YgHrxBjd36FYOW3ZSN5Yw07mXSfil-3hFA-uudUnKrVX6mUi9M5OqPp9FpidFxEdi9mu5d0WvZqSjcoqG4XA0XQZoOE9g1KVAaQS_UJXwVeU3bgl1XXGYldwjy_v7Gne_YXR5cfNfESpz7V-NbikdnQaY0ts6K1S32lPCuunDnJUPY/s6000/pexels-matilda-wormwood-4101036.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="6000" data-original-width="4004" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoh6WTmthdcw2O1YgHrxBjd36FYOW3ZSN5Yw07mXSfil-3hFA-uudUnKrVX6mUi9M5OqPp9FpidFxEdi9mu5d0WvZqSjcoqG4XA0XQZoOE9g1KVAaQS_UJXwVeU3bgl1XXGYldwjy_v7Gne_YXR5cfNfESpz7V-NbikdnQaY0ts6K1S32lPCuunDnJUPY/w134-h200/pexels-matilda-wormwood-4101036.jpg" width="134" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">With the growing popularity of video games, developers bear a heavier responsibility to ensure that their games do not foster toxicity and unsupportive behaviour among players. Johnson and colleagues (2021) decided to investigate when helping behaviour was more likely to occur in video games. In order to do so, they examined two kinds of passion people can have for a hobby: harmonious and obsessive passion. Harmoniously passionate people describe their hobby positively and can engage in it without the risk of negative consequences. In contrast, obsessively passionate people show the same enthusiasm but they tend to neglect other goals or activities while engaging in their hobby. These researchers also suspected that empathy might motivate people to help others in the game. Based on data from 389 participants, they found that player empathy did indeed predict more helping. However, both types of passion were not strongly related to helping behaviour, so empathy appears to be the most important factor. That said, harmonious passion was associated with greater empathy, whereas obsessive passion was associated with less empathy. Based on these findings, empathetic people tend to be more helpful in video games, and those who approach their gaming hobby with harmonious passion are likely to be more empathetic. Given the potential transfer between in-game and real-life behaviour, game developers need to create games that promote empathetic behaviour. Furthermore, building relatedness in gaming communities might be one way to decrease toxicity, creating more welcoming gaming communities.</div><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Johnson, D., Zhao, X., White, K. M., & Wickramasinghe, V. (2021). Need satisfaction, passion, empathy and helping behaviour in videogame play. <i>Computers in Human Behavior</i>, <i>122</i>, 106817.<br /><br />Post by Claire Regina Kurniawan</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Photo by <a href="https://www.pexels.com/@matilda-wormwood/" target="_blank">Matilda Wormwood</a> via Pexels<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"> <!--AddThis Button BEGIN-->
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<!--AddThis Button END-->Raymond A. Marhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07521492403638340957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-70233925437644510202023-06-16T11:22:00.002-04:002023-12-13T11:50:55.670-05:00Research Bulletin: Reading and Student Stress<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwMtZ6RcAAdp752h7gdl4OUC5kVvKgPYRw4w5CF8Wm8oYZyWGP483X-GEdh8dbNN5oRNPB0eZlh8HWKTsPA3O4M9j5UpEaJi_9NQtMIOLDXIKpWiAy2GsKBfnZ5y10IAW5dfyB5aOVMv156PeE841H9e-o8G4cpR_OK5uOa-fwAB0t-zpYHHkApAtF/s2890/student%20reading.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2064" data-original-width="2890" height="143" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwMtZ6RcAAdp752h7gdl4OUC5kVvKgPYRw4w5CF8Wm8oYZyWGP483X-GEdh8dbNN5oRNPB0eZlh8HWKTsPA3O4M9j5UpEaJi_9NQtMIOLDXIKpWiAy2GsKBfnZ5y10IAW5dfyB5aOVMv156PeE841H9e-o8G4cpR_OK5uOa-fwAB0t-zpYHHkApAtF/w200-h143/student%20reading.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><p style="text-align: justify;">Mental health is a pressing concern for university students, with increasing numbers of students seeking mental health services in recent years. Dr. Shelby Levine and colleagues (2020) investigated whether recreational reading could improve the mental health of students by helping them fulfill core psychological needs. They hypothesized that recreational reading could decrease feelings of isolation and low competence, and serve as a form of resistance against restrictive academic environments.<br />At the beginning of the academic year, 201 college students reported their psychological distress, recreational reading goals, and autonomous motivation to read (i.e., of their own volition). At the end of the year, psychological distress and recreational reading achievements were measured again. The researchers discovered that psychological distress was much greater in all students at the end of the year. However, those who read more books had a smaller increase in distress than those who had read less. Further, autonomous motivation to read predicted a more ambitious reading goal, as well as more books completed by the end of the year. Lastly, the more books students read, the less frustrated they felt in terms of core needs, which led to less distress. <br />The authors conclude that fostering an intrinsic love of recreational reading in children and youth should be a key goal for parents and teachers. Based on their findings, promoting and supporting a love for reading could be an effective way to help students cope with the stressors of university.<br /></p><p>Post by Shyamaly Vasuthevan <br /></p><p>* For a copy of the original article, please contact R. Mar (see profile for e-mail).<br /> <br />Photo by <a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/adult-blur-books-close-up-261909/">Pixabay</a> from Pexels. <!--AddThis Button BEGIN-->
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<!--AddThis Button END-->Raymond A. Marhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07521492403638340957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-76528954358410662922023-02-15T17:04:00.006-05:002023-02-15T17:04:41.980-05:00Research Bulletin: Are Meaningful Narratives More Likely to Promote Social Cognition?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD3DlE4miCIh-Luxn0AkhnlpuEjaVgbNRQCxVDRWVMBmAxF1vTeRVpF66rIOi6TwopfdsNtwzDZmoLY0P5rIiC42dGmtW9suOFb5WsHFUkDUoSYKn-i9PwhWnJ244L8WbpkPjoD4oTKUcfVKL3YqDNDT3g37w36xIEqnufbjbkmfjnJqvg16MZKc-2/s5982/pexels-tima-miroshnichenko-7991579.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3988" data-original-width="5982" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD3DlE4miCIh-Luxn0AkhnlpuEjaVgbNRQCxVDRWVMBmAxF1vTeRVpF66rIOi6TwopfdsNtwzDZmoLY0P5rIiC42dGmtW9suOFb5WsHFUkDUoSYKn-i9PwhWnJ244L8WbpkPjoD4oTKUcfVKL3YqDNDT3g37w36xIEqnufbjbkmfjnJqvg16MZKc-2/w200-h133/pexels-tima-miroshnichenko-7991579.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Although a great deal of research has examined whether stories help to promote social cognition, most of this work has been on adults and not delved much into different types of stories. Hannah N. M. De Mulder and colleagues (2022) took it upon themselves to examine this question in adolescents, with a focus on comparing different modalities of presentation (i.e., books, television, film), and hedonic narratives to eudaimonic ones. Eudaimonic narratives prompt audiences to consider deep truths about the world, conveying a sense of meaning and often eliciting experiences of “being moved” by the story (Oliver & Raney, 2011). In contrast, hedonic narratives are focused on providing pleasure for audiences, such as positive emotions and excitement. The researchers asked 126 children aged 8 to 16 how often they read books (or watched television/film) that was hedonic or eudaimonic in nature, and also measured their social abilities in three different ways (self-report, emotion recognition, and the ability to infer mental states). Using a Bayesian approach to analyzing their data, they evaluated whether the data was more or less consistent with several different possibilities. In this population of adolescents, they found little consistent evidence that books, TV, and film predict better social abilities. However, they did observe that exposure to meaningful narratives was associated with better social skills, in particular for television and film. This work highlights the importance of studying a variety of populations, and types of media, when researching the relation between stories and social cognition.<br /></div><div><p>References<br /><br />De Mulder, H. N. M., Hakemulder, F., Klaassen, F., Junge, C. M. M., Hoijtink, H., & van Berkum, J. J. A. (2022). Figuring Out What They Feel: Exposure to eudaimonic narrative Fiction is related to mentalizing ability. <i>Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts</i>, <i>16</i>, 242–258.<br /><br />Oliver, M. B., & Raney, A. A. (2011). Entertainment as pleasurable and meaningful: Identifying hedonic and eudaimonic motivations for entertainment consumption. <i>Journal of Communication</i>, <i>61</i>, 984–1004.<br /></p><p>Post by Raymond Mar<br /> <br />* For a copy of the original article, please contact R. Mar (see profile for e-mail).<br /> <br />Photo by <a href="https://www.pexels.com/@tima-miroshnichenko/" target="_blank">Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels</a> <br /><a class="addthis_button" expr:addthis:title="data:post.title" expr:addthis:url="data:post.url"><img alt="Bookmark and Share" src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif" style="border: 0px none;" /></a></p><div><a class="addthis_button" expr:addthis:title="data:post.title" expr:addthis:url="data:post.url"><img alt="Bookmark and Share" height="16" src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif" style="border: 0px none;" width="125" /></a>
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Marhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07521492403638340957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-48867204082010064152023-01-26T12:59:00.003-05:002023-01-26T18:51:14.245-05:00Health from Fiction<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu9gQXJ6RWrjGKU4QRCViUCVKcGeBoeomdPhYGXfOUy3sMVmQNuJ1hQf-vCyJ2UoiUW1PjBD2qbgySrmgdBFPD7rnUQc7SQmfvnw7HZ-XI69OhQv_TpZhnVdqOW9uqUK49OHE2VVR-rVynz9uMmvxJ71IAP5qsGf9mKRdzyJj62EYbhCyHfnnH0WpP7g/s822/Journal%20of%20Health%20Psychology.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="822" data-original-width="590" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu9gQXJ6RWrjGKU4QRCViUCVKcGeBoeomdPhYGXfOUy3sMVmQNuJ1hQf-vCyJ2UoiUW1PjBD2qbgySrmgdBFPD7rnUQc7SQmfvnw7HZ-XI69OhQv_TpZhnVdqOW9uqUK49OHE2VVR-rVynz9uMmvxJ71IAP5qsGf9mKRdzyJj62EYbhCyHfnnH0WpP7g/w189-h263/Journal%20of%20Health%20Psychology.jpg" width="189" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Over the years the writers of articles for OnFiction have argued that short stories and novels, as well as plays, films, and nowadays some video games, offer us insights into the minds of others and into the nature of human interactions. </div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">A parallel set of arguments has been offered in our understanding of human health and illness. Among the foremost contributors here has been Ad Kaptain, a medical psychologist at Leiden University Medical Centre in Belgium. Some of his articles are listed below.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Palatino;">Among Kaptein’s interests is in how people experience being ill. One of his ideas is that empathy from doctors and nursing staff can have a beneficial effect on the wellbeing and recovery of patients. Kaptein is convinced that literature can help to improve empathy in those working in healthcare.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: Palatino;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">One of the works that Kaptain discusses in an article that he published in 2022, in the <i>Journal of</i> <i>Health Psychology,</i> is Margaret Edson’s <i>Wit</i>: “the Pulitzer prize winning novel/play about coping with ovarian cancer and the associated struggle between patient and health care providers” (p. 1618). Another work that he discusses is Thomas Bernhard’s <i>The Breath, </i>from which he quotes this:<i> “</i> … but it was impossible to speak to them …The doctors on the ward-round never did anything to enlighten their patients in the death ward, and in consequence all three patients were effectively abandoned, both medically and morally.” Then comes the following: “Every day they appeared in front of my bed, a white wall of unconcern in which no trace of humanity was discernable” (p. 1619).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Kaptain refers to the work of our research group, in which we have found that engaging with fiction can enable people to increase their empathy (see e.g. Mar 2018). Perhaps “people” might include health care providers of the kind that are referred to in works such as Edson’s <i>Wit</i> and Bernhard’s <i>The Breath.</i><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Kaptein A. A. et al. (2018) Start making sense: Art informing health psychology. <i>Health Psychology Open 5:</i> 1–13.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Kaptein A. A. et al. (2020) Heart in Art: cardiovascular diseases in novels, films, and paintings.<i> Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 15:</i> 2.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Kaptain, A. A. (2022). Novels as data: Health humanities and health psychology. <i>Journal of Health Psychology, 27</i>, 1615-1625.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Mar, R. A. (2018).<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.yorku.ca/mar/Mar%20In%20Press_DP_Evaluating%20whether%20stories%20can%20promote%20social%20cognition%20Introducing%20the%20Social%20Processes%20and%20Content%20Entrained%20by%20Narrative%20SPaCEN%20framework.pdf" style="color: #954f72;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, serif; letter-spacing: 0.15pt; text-decoration: none;">Evaluating whether stories can promote social cognition: Introducing the Social Processes and Content Entrained by Narrative (SPaCEN) framework.</span></a></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span lang="EN-US" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;"> </span></span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Discourse Processes</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">5/6</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">, 454–479.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;"><br /></span></p><div><a class="addthis_button" expr:addthis:title="data:post.title" expr:addthis:url="data:post.url"><img alt="Bookmark and Share" height="16" src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif" style="border: 0px none;" width="125" /></a>
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<!--AddThis Button END--></div>Keith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-3377798140026610732023-01-05T09:33:00.003-05:002023-01-05T09:33:00.207-05:00Research Bulletin: Are Some Types of Book Titles Better Liked and Better Remembered?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuqEZLmRIGRHJ25QLw-gb5l9ZIKZvcZ8L8G39dqlieSeJcWbSXQG3yAetEMr3Yt9BF3Yyf9eokAsI_0vUH1ODFW8WiAVyUXjUwe7pOX1CcJOeeg-Rril4DufEe7W1lBETKnJJhojYRCjnSSITkExRf1cTlEErD0p07UIhLSwy1OgaxtdYsgSdedR03/s6000/pexels-suzy-hazelwood-1122865%20(1).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3376" data-original-width="6000" height="113" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuqEZLmRIGRHJ25QLw-gb5l9ZIKZvcZ8L8G39dqlieSeJcWbSXQG3yAetEMr3Yt9BF3Yyf9eokAsI_0vUH1ODFW8WiAVyUXjUwe7pOX1CcJOeeg-Rril4DufEe7W1lBETKnJJhojYRCjnSSITkExRf1cTlEErD0p07UIhLSwy1OgaxtdYsgSdedR03/w200-h113/pexels-suzy-hazelwood-1122865%20(1).jpg" width="200" /></a></div><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Humans spend vast amounts of time engaging with fictional stories. There are four main theories that help to explain this love for fiction. First, fiction contains social and psychological experiences of the characters, which helps us gain a better understanding of our own world (Mar & Oatley, 2008). Second, humans are drawn to gossip, which is essentially what fiction is. Fiction gives us a window into the social relationships of the characters. Third, humans are drawn to the moral content of fiction. People enjoy rooting for the good guys, but also enjoy stories about morally ambiguous characters (Janicke & Raney, 2015). Lastly, fiction is associated with hard-wired pleasures, such as an attraction to wealth, power, and beauty (Pinker, 1997).<br /> <br />Barnes and Black (2022) wanted to examine whether book titles containing words associated with these four theories would be more appealing and better remembered than titles without such words. The researchers generated five different words associated with each of the four theories. For example, the words “guilty, innocence, virtue, taboo, and evil” were used to create titles related to morality. Five titles that were not related to any of the four categories were selected from the USA Today Bestseller list, to act as the control titles. Undergraduates were then randomly assigned to view these titles, rate how appealing each<br />was, and then were tested on their memory for each title.<br /> <br />Participants rated the titles associated with the four main categories (i.e., mental states, gossip, morality, and pleasure) as more appealing than the control titles. For recall, the “mental states” category was the least well remembered out of all the categories. Next time you go to the bookstore, it would be fun to see whether the bestselling books have titles related to mental states, gossip, pleasure, or morality!<br /> <br />References<br /> <br />Barnes, J. L., & Black, J. E. (2022). What’s in a name? Book title salience and the<br />psychology of fiction. <i>Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts</i>, <i>16</i>(2), 290–301.<br /> <br />Janicke, S. H., & Raney, A. A. (2015). Exploring the role of identification and moral<br />disengagement in the enjoyment of an antihero television series. <i>Communications</i>, <i>40</i>(4),<br />485-495.<br /> <br />Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of<br />social experience. <i>Perspectives on Psychological Science</i>, <i>3</i>(3), 173–192.<br /> <br />Pinker, S. (1997). <i>How the mind works</i>. Norton Company.<br /> <br />Post by Tia Kleiner<br /> <br />* For a copy of the original article, please contact R. Mar (see profile for e-mail).<br /> <br />Photo by <a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/closeup-photo-of-assorted-title-books-1122865/">Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels</a> <br /></p><div><a class="addthis_button" expr:addthis:title="data:post.title" expr:addthis:url="data:post.url"><img alt="Bookmark and Share" src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif" style="border: 0px none;" /></a>
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Marhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07521492403638340957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-85824477012296126712022-11-29T10:04:00.004-05:002022-11-29T10:04:53.507-05:00Research Bulletin: Fiction and Mental Inferencing in a Latin American Sample<div><a class="addthis_button" expr:addthis:title="data:post.title" expr:addthis:url="data:post.url"></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP4Mu_HO_KTDaCzfGQqweGqls-RBAIp-OjbDfzvWlHG8zmVGR7uyRgJG2YPQWLD8xt4Wko8Em6XHtBesxV37gDQQIWQa1ocb9LQ7OAkAl3ADUeJ5A_ub_b9_HEn6QQW6OluCUx7V9OZv7tpkQxfmsfHPKMnGjKzb4deYWFqq07lCUOfZxgy4MgEY-Y/s5760/pexels-polina-zimmerman-3747468.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3840" data-original-width="5760" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP4Mu_HO_KTDaCzfGQqweGqls-RBAIp-OjbDfzvWlHG8zmVGR7uyRgJG2YPQWLD8xt4Wko8Em6XHtBesxV37gDQQIWQa1ocb9LQ7OAkAl3ADUeJ5A_ub_b9_HEn6QQW6OluCUx7V9OZv7tpkQxfmsfHPKMnGjKzb4deYWFqq07lCUOfZxgy4MgEY-Y/w200-h133/pexels-polina-zimmerman-3747468.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Theory of Mind, or mentalizing, is an aspect of cognitive empathy that refers to the ability to understand that others have mental states and perspectives that may be different from one’s own. Previous research has established a link between reading fiction and empathy (e.g., Fong et al., 2013). Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction is associated with higher scores on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task (RMET; Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), an ability task measuring Theory of Mind (Mar et al., 2006). A recent study by Tabullo and colleagues (2018) explored this relationship further. In a cross-cultural replication, the authors enlisted a Latin American sample of Spanish-speaking Argentinians to examine associations among fiction exposure, reading habits, trait empathy, and Theory of Mind. Participants self-reported their reading habits and empathy, and completed a series of tasks measuring their exposure to fiction and Theory of Mind ability.</div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify;">Although past studies found a positive association between exposure to fiction and Theory of Mind, this group found this result replicated only for their male participants. Higher scores for the RMET (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), were associated with higher scores for fiction exposure, but only for males. For women, the opposite was observed. This sex difference has not been previously observed in past studies, and so this finding requires replication and further exploration. Unfortunately, one limitation OF this study is the relatively few male participants in the sample (n = 71; n = 137 females). Future studies should further investigate possible sex differences when examining the relation between reading fiction and Theory of Mind.<br /></div><div><br />References:</div><div><br />Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Hill, J., Raste, Y., & Plumb, I. (2001). The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test revised version: a study with normal adults, and adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. <i>The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines</i>, <i>42</i>(2), 241-251.<br /> </div><div>Fong, K., Mullin, J. B., & Mar, R. A. (2013). What you read matters: The role of fiction genre in predicting interpersonal sensitivity. <i>Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts</i>, <i>7</i>(4), 370–376. </div><div> </div><div>Tabullo, A. J., Jimenez, V. A. N., & Garcia, C. S. (2018). Associations between fiction reading, trait empathy, and theory of mind ability. <i>International Journal of Psychology & Psychological Therapy</i>, <i>18</i>(3), 353-370.<br /></div><div><span style="-moz-box-align: unset; -moz-box-direction: unset; -moz-box-flex: unset; -moz-box-ordinal-group: unset; -moz-box-orient: unset; -moz-box-pack: unset; -moz-float-edge: unset; -moz-force-broken-image-icon: unset; -moz-image-region: unset; -moz-orient: unset; -moz-osx-font-smoothing: unset; -moz-text-size-adjust: unset; -moz-user-focus: unset; -moz-user-input: unset; -moz-user-modify: unset; -moz-window-dragging: unset; -webkit-line-clamp: unset; -webkit-text-fill-color: unset; -webkit-text-stroke: unset; accent-color: unset; animation: unset; appearance: unset; aspect-ratio: unset; backdrop-filter: unset; backface-visibility: unset; background-blend-mode: unset; background: unset; block-size: unset; border-block: unset; border-collapse: unset; border-end-end-radius: unset; border-end-start-radius: unset; 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Post by Valeria Hernandez</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><span style="-moz-box-align: unset; -moz-box-direction: unset; -moz-box-flex: unset; -moz-box-ordinal-group: unset; -moz-box-orient: unset; -moz-box-pack: unset; -moz-float-edge: unset; -moz-force-broken-image-icon: unset; -moz-image-region: unset; -moz-orient: unset; -moz-osx-font-smoothing: unset; -moz-text-size-adjust: unset; -moz-user-focus: unset; -moz-user-input: unset; -moz-user-modify: unset; -moz-window-dragging: unset; -webkit-line-clamp: unset; -webkit-text-fill-color: unset; -webkit-text-stroke: unset; accent-color: unset; animation: unset; appearance: unset; aspect-ratio: unset; backdrop-filter: unset; backface-visibility: unset; background-blend-mode: unset; background: unset; block-size: unset; border-block: unset; border-collapse: unset; border-end-end-radius: unset; border-end-start-radius: unset; border-inline: unset; border-radius: unset; border-spacing: unset; border-start-end-radius: unset; 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* For a copy of the original article, please contact R. Mar (see profile for e-mail).</div><div> </div><div>Photo by <a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-woman-reading-book-3747468/">Polina Zimmerman from Pexels</a> <br /></div><div><span style="-moz-box-align: unset; -moz-box-direction: unset; -moz-box-flex: unset; -moz-box-ordinal-group: unset; -moz-box-orient: unset; -moz-box-pack: unset; -moz-float-edge: unset; -moz-force-broken-image-icon: unset; -moz-image-region: unset; -moz-orient: unset; -moz-osx-font-smoothing: unset; -moz-text-size-adjust: unset; -moz-user-focus: unset; -moz-user-input: unset; -moz-user-modify: unset; -moz-window-dragging: unset; -webkit-line-clamp: unset; -webkit-text-fill-color: unset; -webkit-text-stroke: unset; accent-color: unset; animation: unset; appearance: unset; aspect-ratio: unset; backdrop-filter: unset; backface-visibility: unset; background-blend-mode: unset; background: unset; block-size: unset; border-block: unset; border-collapse: unset; border-end-end-radius: unset; border-end-start-radius: unset; 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<!--AddThis Button END-->Raymond A. Marhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07521492403638340957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-9635228966209159922022-06-17T14:29:00.003-04:002022-12-06T09:11:17.365-05:00The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx-0NLgNRnKzsTznDiqWDoUEVd4eTaDr4dGYHErmiQWEJrXCqDuuC8Ow8HAaufmTq5HLpPBMcVXDePXDB2bjt75mjfUj7sw1m_5u9kfLnyhLcQuBmg-XF9wdrb3Y0iiLlrO6rrIHxr9hkNVHYOxqJM3Zyy6zEG66ag66CllqTL9faT9fmoxIXz-aIEAA/s1084/Reading%20List.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1084" data-original-width="746" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx-0NLgNRnKzsTznDiqWDoUEVd4eTaDr4dGYHErmiQWEJrXCqDuuC8Ow8HAaufmTq5HLpPBMcVXDePXDB2bjt75mjfUj7sw1m_5u9kfLnyhLcQuBmg-XF9wdrb3Y0iiLlrO6rrIHxr9hkNVHYOxqJM3Zyy6zEG66ag66CllqTL9faT9fmoxIXz-aIEAA/s320/Reading%20List.jpg" width="220" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It’s hard to think of a more appropriate novel for OnFiction than <i>The Reading List</i> by Sara Nisha Adams. It’s about how readers can enter the hearts of novels, and novels can enter the hearts of readers.</div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">One protagonist is Mukesh, an elderly, grief-stricken man whose wife, Naina, has recently died of cancer. A second is the disgruntled seventeen-year-old Aleisha, who has taken a summer job at the Harrow Road Library. This place is where near where both of them live, a bit beyond the North Circular Road in London, near Wembley Football Stadium.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">The book starts with a prologue by Aidan. A few years before Aleisha, his sister, started her summer job, he was happy to escape into this same library and read for a little while. Once, beside him, was a big stack of books that prevented him seeing the person who sat next to him. But he observed the hand of this person writing. When this person left, the piece of paper with writing on it was left behind. Aidan looked at it. Here’s what it said in neat warm letters: <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0.0001pt 36pt;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">Just in case you need it.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0.0001pt 72pt;"><i><span style="font-family: Palatino;">To Kill a Mockingbird<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0.0001pt 72pt;"><i><span style="font-family: Palatino;">Rebecca <o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0.0001pt 72pt;"><i><span style="font-family: Palatino;">The Kite Runner<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0.0001pt 72pt;"><i><span style="font-family: Palatino;">Life of Pi<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0.0001pt 72pt;"><i><span style="font-family: Palatino;">Pride and Prejudice<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0.0001pt 72pt;"><i><span style="font-family: Palatino;">Little Women<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0.0001pt 72pt;"><i><span style="font-family: Palatino;">Beloved<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0.0001pt 72pt;"><i><span style="font-family: Palatino;">A Suitable Boy<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">One day, when Aleisha was working in the library, Mukesh arrived and tried to enter. He didn’t notice the button to press that opened the new doors. Aleisha saw him outside but didn’t help. When at last he did get in by following some other visitors, he asked her for a recommendation. She didn’t give one. She was even rather rude. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Then clearing some books away, in a corner of the library where detective stories and crime fiction were shelved—a nice place with windows that overlook a park—she saw one of the regulars whom she thought of as “Crime Fiction Guy.” He said he wanted to return a book: <i>To Kill a Mockingbird. <o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">“Not my usual crime book,” he said. “But … I keep coming back to it … This book … you know … I’d recommend it.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">When Crime Thriller Guy left, she logged the book back in. On opening it, she found the very same reading list as her brother Aidan had found a while ago, with this book being first on the list. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Feeling upset and guilty for having been horrible to Mukesh she went over to him “her heart pounding in her chest.” A book that everyone should read, she thought. She recommended it to Mukesh and thought of it as her olive branch.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Aidan and Aleisha take turns at staying at home to care for their difficult and occasionally impossible mother, who is only sometimes affectionate. Often she falls asleep in the day-time and, on some of these occasions, when she is at home, Aleisha who doesn’t much like books, reads <i>To Kill a Mockingbird,</i> which she has pinched from the library without checking it out. She becomes engaged in it and, as this happens, some of her troubles begin to fade away. Later, Mukesh arrives at the library and wants to borrow this very same book, the one that she had recommended.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">In <i>The Reading List’s </i>Chapter 10, Mukesh and Aleisha in the library, thoughtfully discuss <i>To Kill a Mockingbird,</i> and talk with each other about how it has affected them.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">As the chapters continue, Mukesh and Aleisha read and discuss the other books on the list, which was written on scraps of paper that keep turning up at unexpected times in peculiar places. As this novel continues, coming to each of the books, we read of the friendly discussions between Mukesh and Aleisha, and of how what they’d read offered insights and had positive effects on their discontented lives, that encouraged them to move forward. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">And a mystery: who was it who wrote the list of books found on scraps of paper here and there?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Coming to the end this review it’s a bit embarrassing to say that <i>The Reading List</i> is one of those books that can bring tears to the eyes.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0.2pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">PS. As a result of reading this novel, I read the second book on the list, <i>Rebecca,</i> by Daphne du Maurier, which I hadn’t read before, and found that, like the others, it’s rather good.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><a class="addthis_button" expr:addthis:title="data:post.title" expr:addthis:url="data:post.url"><img alt="Bookmark and Share" height="16" src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif" style="border: 0px none;" width="125" /></a>
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<!--AddThis Button END--></div>Keith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-29083856885188564262022-06-08T12:52:00.003-04:002022-12-06T09:11:45.756-05:00"Night Nurse," short story by Keith Oatley<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm;"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;"></span></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQSkb43CfqkG3PIGY2l6Ptfom503reoHG_t9abdS2ylrdykQKFEUHE2406qxo0vZjuprUqkbpF82CCY-Sw7BgJ38tpcwiLjhDNj1txBr_Gm_xHf4mvrWgduMFB3yfo-dmTYeHccKsQ5huygRVUHBxenMmilBZT4Ik7idSF4Ujm3cPcYcX6K8U3LxmwRg/s1004/Sparrow.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1004" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQSkb43CfqkG3PIGY2l6Ptfom503reoHG_t9abdS2ylrdykQKFEUHE2406qxo0vZjuprUqkbpF82CCY-Sw7BgJ38tpcwiLjhDNj1txBr_Gm_xHf4mvrWgduMFB3yfo-dmTYeHccKsQ5huygRVUHBxenMmilBZT4Ik7idSF4Ujm3cPcYcX6K8U3LxmwRg/w219-h209/Sparrow.jpg" width="219" /></a></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">O</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">n Wednesday, just before midnight. Angela, a night nurse in a hospice, came to see Phillipa, who had cancer. <o:p></o:p></span></div><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">After they’d talked a bit, Angela said, “Here, let me tuck you in. Comfortable?”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 1cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: -1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">L</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">at<b>e </b>next evening, Thursday, again a little before midnight, Angela came and saw that Philippa was still awake. She pulled a chair beside the bed and sat down to chat.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“What do you think it’s like, on the other side?” asked Philippa.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“I did a lot of wondering about that, too.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“Good if it’s peaceful, calm.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“Yes.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“I think I was OK as a mother, not so good as a wife”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“I read, recently,” said Angela, “about someone called the Venerable Bede, around the year 600. He told the story of a sparrow who flew through an opening into the great hall where everyone was eating, flew around a bit, did this and that, then found another opening, and flew out. Bede said that in the same way we appear on earth for a while. But we are like the sparrow. Of what happens before this life, or of what happens after it, we know nothing.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“I like the idea of the sparrow,” said Philippa. “Fluttering about.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“I do, too.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“I</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;"> didn’t know if you were awake,” said the day nurse. “I’m Wendy. Time for breakfast.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“Sorry. I was dozing.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“Are you OK? How did you sleep?”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“May I ask you something? Angela, the night nurse. Do you know her?” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“Here’s coffee. Do you want apple juice, or orange, or cranberry?”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“She told me a story that I found strangely comforting.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“She was a lovely person.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“How d’you mean ‘was?’ What day is it?”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“Friday.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“She was here, with me, late last evening. Thursday.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;">“I probably shouldn’t tell you. Angela had a terminal illness. She kept working right through Wednesday night. She had an adverse reaction to a new painkiller. She passed away on Thursday morning.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 1cm;">Image from Wikipedia.</p><div><a class="addthis_button" expr:addthis:title="data:post.title" expr:addthis:url="data:post.url"><img alt="Bookmark and Share" height="16" src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif" style="border: 0px none;" width="125" /></a>
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<!--AddThis Button END-->Keith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-75141863232060006822021-08-21T10:15:00.004-04:002022-12-06T09:12:09.587-05:00Our Souls At Night<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtDu_nT1UOFbD_NuSVzE2saD-po4zBlfGeNGgGW2JAGE_H8aG1dZIDpQtMww38dthazYQ8zD_9XVifr8Pb4z55RPyBrvIpIsQI5s4Lsdt_QBV65fgpk-JC6cUV4kV5EUN7pCkTp_3oduIE/s836/Souls+at+Nignt+cover+pic.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="836" data-original-width="554" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtDu_nT1UOFbD_NuSVzE2saD-po4zBlfGeNGgGW2JAGE_H8aG1dZIDpQtMww38dthazYQ8zD_9XVifr8Pb4z55RPyBrvIpIsQI5s4Lsdt_QBV65fgpk-JC6cUV4kV5EUN7pCkTp_3oduIE/s320/Souls+at+Nignt+cover+pic.jpg" width="212" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The idea of “schema” was central to Frederic Bartlett’s book of 1932,<span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span><i style="font-family: Palatino;">Remembering, </i><span style="font-family: Palatino;">where</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> he described a series of experiments in which people were asked to read a story, or to look at a picture, and then reproduce it either immediately or later. Bartlett’s proposal was that remembering is an activity based not on anything like a photograph or recording, but on an understanding—schema—of how, in a way that is familiar to a person and within a society, one does certain kinds of actions like getting onto a train, or sitting down with others for a meal, plus an emotional attitude together with a rather small amount of detail. In</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span><i style="font-family: Palatino;">Art and Illusion,</i><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span><span style="font-family: Palatino;">Ernst Gombrich (1960) took this idea into an understanding of representational painting which, he said, is based on schema plus correction: for instance, a general idea of what a mountain, or a house, or a person might look like, together with a correction so that it becomes more specific or, in the case of some paintings, new and surprising.</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></div><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">Kent Haruf’s novel of 2015, <i>Our Souls at Night</i> is also based on a schema: our idea of what it is for two people to have an affair. In the first chapter of the book, we are introduced to the novel’s protagonist, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">the elderly widow, Addie Moore, who lives in a small town in Colorado. She walks over to the house, one block away, of another elderly person: a widower, Louis Waters, whom she knows a little bit but not at all well. Invited in, she tells him that she won’t stay long, then says that she is getting cold feet. She then says this.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 1cm; text-align: justify;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 1cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">I </span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-color: white; font-family: Palatino;">wonder if you would consider coming to my house sometimes to sleep with me… I mean we’re both alone. We’ve been by ourselves for too long. For years. I’m lonely. I think you might be too. I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me. And talk.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">The usual schema we might have of going to bed with someone, or having an affair, receives a correction. Addie says to Louis that she means what she says. “I’m not talking about sex" she says but "lying warm in bed, companionably.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">At first, Louis makes his visits late in the evening, when he is unlikely to be seen. Addie and he try to keep their arrangement secret. As they talk with each other about their marriages, their concerns, they find themselves becoming closer. One event which Addie recounted had been especially hard. Her five-year old daughter, Connie, had been playing in the back yard with her elder brother, Gene, and had run out into the street, had been hit by a car and died. The event had been devastating for Addie’s marriage and devastating for Gene. Addie became the target of both her husband’s and her son’s resentments.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Other people in the town start to notice Addie’s and Louis’s relationship and to talk about it; no longer a secret. The turning point of the novel occurs when Gene asks Addie to look after his young son, Jamie, for a while, because his wife has left him. Jamie is a rather neglected child, but Louis takes to him, looks after him as a parent might, buys him a dog, of which the boy becomes fond. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">What are your schemas for growing older, for families, for parental relationships, for affairs? <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">What happens next in this novel? Do Addie and Louis get round to sex? What might Jamie think of what is going on? Maybe I should tell you. Maybe we should gossip. What do you think?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Frederic Bartlett (1932). <i>Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology</i>. Cambridge University Press.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Ernst Gombrich (1960). <i>Art and illusion</i>. Phaidon.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Kent Haruf (2015). <i>Our souls at night</i>. Knopf.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><div><a class="addthis_button" expr:addthis:title="data:post.title" expr:addthis:url="data:post.url"><img alt="Bookmark and Share" height="16" src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif" style="border: 0px none;" width="125" /></a>
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<!--AddThis Button END-->Keith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-7378508711867709932021-05-07T08:19:00.003-04:002022-12-06T09:12:31.217-05:00Klara and the future of humanity<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmXsMDQ3Jblwol1JmDucgHnqASyd1T0PTZ6uN9HeSBh2FIOXc2lcvspMIdZYNkxOS8nFsB5BJl248yTWPdC5iDwe-OcwCaOmf00_w2EsLT5xvU4qmxDn_3_KGXZbEw9YSM2hcqoLA8CphO/s988/Klara+pic.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="988" data-original-width="664" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmXsMDQ3Jblwol1JmDucgHnqASyd1T0PTZ6uN9HeSBh2FIOXc2lcvspMIdZYNkxOS8nFsB5BJl248yTWPdC5iDwe-OcwCaOmf00_w2EsLT5xvU4qmxDn_3_KGXZbEw9YSM2hcqoLA8CphO/s320/Klara+pic.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In his latest novel, <i>Klara and the Sun,</i> Kazuo Ishiguro reaches beyond what occurs in most fiction. This novel’s protagonist, Klara, is a robot. Whereas some people have wondered whether robots will, like humans, become selfish and try to take over the Earth, here the question is different. Klara is an AF: Artificial Friend. The question is of what it is to be human, what it is to be a friend, what it is to love someone. <o:p></o:p></div><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">Klara looks like a human being, but she is powered by the rays of Sun, in which—or whom—she has a deeply religious belief. The person to whom Klara becomes a friend, is Josie, a teenager who lives with her Mother. After her morning cup of coffee Mother (capital M) goes off to work each day, leaving Josie with her Artificial Friend. Klara is intelligent, very observant (a pleasure of this novel is reading Klara’s patterns of thought) and comes to love her, to know her as if from the inside. In the first part of the novel, Josie seems to manage alright, but she then becomes more and more sick. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">Among the humans who appear as characters in this story, one of the questions is which ones have been “lifted.” We don’t come across that concept until well into the book (page 70 on my Kindle version). We are never told, here, what “lifted” means. My inference is that it means that, when they were children, some of the human characters have been genetically engineered to raise their intelligence. This predisposes some of them to look down on others who have not received this modification. But perhaps their piece of genetic engineering also makes some of them more vulnerable, liable to become sick.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">So, alongside the issue of whether robots, made on the basis of artificial intelligence, will accompany human beings on this planet—and with what motives—there comes a newer question. It is that of whether we humans can have our own abilities supplemented by means of receiving genetic changes. A biography and discussion of this issue has also come out this year. By Walter Isaacson, it’s called <i>The Code Breaker: Jennifer Daudna, </i></span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race</span></i><i><span style="font-family: Palatino;">. </span></i><span style="font-family: Palatino;">Daudna, the protagonist of this story, is the principal pioneer of genetic engineering.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">A central theme in <i>Klara and the Sun,</i> is whether, perhaps, if Josie dies, a physical model that is being made of her by a man who is a sort of portrait-sculptor, might be inhabited by Klara. The idea is that then, with the very extensive understanding of her that Klara has acquired, the processing parts of the Artificial Friend might be inserted into this physical model so that she might reproduce Josie’s movements, her facial expressions, her thoughts, and her words. In this way perhaps other people might not be able to tell the difference between this artificial Josie and the one who might die. All other people? Including her Mother? Or would something necessarily be left out? And if so what might that be?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica;">Kazuo Ishiguro (2021). <i>Klara and the Sun</i>. Toronto: Knopf.</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica;">Walter Isaacson (2021). <i>The code breaker: Jennifer Doudna, gene editing, and the future of the human race</i>. New York: Simon & Schuster.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div><a class="addthis_button" expr:addthis:title="data:post.title" expr:addthis:url="data:post.url"><img alt="Bookmark and Share" height="16" src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif" style="border: 0px none;" width="125" /></a>
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<!--AddThis Button END-->Keith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-60594755551785556502021-02-08T14:34:00.006-05:002022-12-06T09:13:00.121-05:00Engagement in Reading<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #333333; font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12pt;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgij15nL8uAs75bS08t34300IX8_jO5elGNgSi-IwMQj_OXZhcLQ2BDrxewMoLiV5X0Ltv3AJ821Cshtcec3sHGE9kGhUVEAGm5IrR7G6EvQIJaQJA6uFci-MtgY6mrpCVr2h1m8BUzMCr/s1954/Csikszentmihalyi+Flow.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1954" data-original-width="1314" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgij15nL8uAs75bS08t34300IX8_jO5elGNgSi-IwMQj_OXZhcLQ2BDrxewMoLiV5X0Ltv3AJ821Cshtcec3sHGE9kGhUVEAGm5IrR7G6EvQIJaQJA6uFci-MtgY6mrpCVr2h1m8BUzMCr/s320/Csikszentmihalyi+Flow.jpg" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Palatino;">Birte Thissen, with colleagues Winfried Menninghaus (Director of the Department of Language and Literature at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, in Frankfurt, Germany), and Wolff Schlotz, have recently published an article which brings together Mihaly Csikszentmihali’s concept of flow and the activity of reading fiction. </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Palatino;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Palatino;">Flow is full engagement in what one is doing. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Csikszentmihalyi</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Palatino;"> illustrated this by depicting Rico Medelin who worked in a factory that made movie projectors. His job was on an assembly line and, as each part-made projector came along, the operation he had to do was supposed to take 43 seconds. He had to do this 600 times a day, and he’d been in this job for five years. Many of us would not have been able to do this for so long, but Rico had analyzed the task, and thought about it; worked out how to use his tools and perform his task better and more quickly so that, in his best average over a day, he had completed each task for each unit in two thirds of the time required. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">"It is better than anything else," said Rico. "It's better than watching TV” (p. 39-40). Another person who was interviewed was a 62 year old woman who enjoyed tending her cows and orchard. "I find a special satisfaction in caring for the plants," she said. "I like to see them grow each day" (p. 55). A mother said about reading with her young daughter: "She reads to me, and I read to her, and that's a time when I sort of lose touch with the rest of the world. I'm totally absorbed in what I'm doing" (p. 53).</span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">In this state of flow, which Csikszentmihalyi also calls "optimal experience," a person has a sense of purpose and creativity, so that the self and the activity merge. It’s not a matter of waiting for something pleasant to come along, but of setting yourself goals, analyzing and solving problems, creating an activity that is meaningful. </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">In their study, Thissen, Menninghaus and Schlotz asked whether this idea applied to the reading of fiction. They had 373 people, between 18 and 81 years of age, recruited from an online survey in two large bookstores, read a German translation of Homer’s “Scylla and Charybdis,” Chapter 12 of <i>Odysseus.</i> They found that the experience of flow, as measured by a newly created 27-item scale, was a significant predictor of a feeling of presence in the story world, of identification with the protagonist, of enjoyment of reading, and of comprehension of the story. Here’s how the authors end the abstract of their paper.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 7.5pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Palatino;">Although, to date, the concept of flow has played only a minor role in research on fiction reading, our results suggest that it deserves being integrated into future theoretical frameworks and empirical investigations of positive reading experiences.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). <i>Flow: The psychology of optimal experience</i>. New York: Harper Collins.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Homer (762 BCE). <i>The Odyssey</i>. Harmondsworth: Penguin (current edition 1946).</span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Thissen, B. A. K., Menninghaus, W., & Schlotz, W. (2020). The pleasures of reading fiction explained by flow, presence, identification, suspense, and cognitive involvement. <i>Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, </i>Advanced online publication, November doi:10.1037/aca0000367</span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a class="addthis_button" expr:addthis:title="data:post.title" expr:addthis:url="data:post.url" style="font-family: -webkit-standard;"><img alt="Bookmark and Share" height="16" src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif" style="border: 0px none;" width="125" /></a></span></span></p>
<!--AddThis Button END-->Keith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-59672423822381868202020-12-16T16:41:00.002-05:002022-12-06T09:13:16.250-05:00Kate Chopin's The Awakening<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i><span style="font-family: Palatino;"></span></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG-j7W-xi00TzhIkHAuQOknoBYKkW5zkXQYG9FrDKIsBJEEE-958LDP6OtGJXIjUXkoFP7W6i35827cmWABUtrqR5WkXse77L2ZFkkqwXBLPCLZcF1N4o9pOwz-L3AUBgXwTpTn9QpYA46/s1864/Kate+Chopin+Book+cover.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1864" data-original-width="1228" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG-j7W-xi00TzhIkHAuQOknoBYKkW5zkXQYG9FrDKIsBJEEE-958LDP6OtGJXIjUXkoFP7W6i35827cmWABUtrqR5WkXse77L2ZFkkqwXBLPCLZcF1N4o9pOwz-L3AUBgXwTpTn9QpYA46/s320/Kate+Chopin+Book+cover.jpg" /></a></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>The Awakening,</i><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> published by Kate Chopin when she was 49 years old, has become a literary classic, and an influential feminist novella. </span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm -13.95pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">Here’s a brief summary. <span style="color: #333333;">Edna Pontillier is on vacation on Grand Isle with her husband Léonce. In the novella’s eighth paragraph she walks up from a beach with Robert LeBrun, after bathing in the warm Caribbean Sea. On the island she also meets Adèle Ratignolle, mother of three small children, the first person with whom she ever talks about her feelings. Although to start with, Edna cannot swim, she learns to do so and feels liberated. She starts to think of rejecting assigned roles. By the end of the vacation, Edna and Léonce have grown apart, while she and Robert have grown close. To avoid what might happen, Robert moves to Mexico. Back in New Orleans, where she lives, Edna relinquishes her role as housewife, and becomes serious about her painting. Léonce takes a long business trip to New York, his mother looks after the couple’s two young children, and Edna moves into a place she calls the pigeon house. She spends a night with a man who’s a substitute for Robert, whom she thinks is still in Mexico. But he returns and visits her. After some awkward meetings, she kisses him. Although she says that he “must have forgotten that she was Léonce Pontillier’s wife,” she and Robert both declare their love for each other. Then a servant brings a message to say that Adèle Ratignolle is sick, so Edna goes to see her. When Edna returns, she finds a note from Robert. It says: “I love you. Good by—because I love you.” She realizes that he has departed, so she will be solitary. She returns to Grand Isle, removes her clothes, and swims out to sea. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm -13.95pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">As well as this novella, Kate Chopin is known for her short stories. Her principal literary influence was <span style="color: #333333;">Guy de Maupassant (whom she first read when she was about 35). “I read his stories,” she said, “I marvelled at them.” He spoke to her directly and intimately. She admired his escape from tradition, his rejection of hypocrisy. Her first short story was published when she was 39.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #333333; font-family: Palatino;">Although there had been myths, fables, and fairy tales, the literary short story dates back perhaps to 1842: Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” The short story can be compared with the sonnet: eight lines, four lines, and two lines, with potential turning points between each set, after which we can see what had gone before in a new way. In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” (1894) for instance, the protagonist first hears that her husband has died in a railway accident. She breaks down in tears, then goes to her room to be alone. There—turning point—she experiences “something</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name”—a feeling of freedom. Then, towards the end of the story, she leaves her room and goes downstairs. There’s a turning of a key in the front door lock—final turning point—her husband returns; she dies of a heart attack.</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #333333; font-family: Palatino;">In <i>The Awakening,</i> Kate Chopin uses techniques that are typical of poetry. Although she does this all the way through, an instance is in Chapter 10, when Edna finds she can swim, metaphors include:</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> sea—liberation, learning to swim—accomplishment, actions previously not taken—actions that can now be taken, indoors is containment—outside are possibilities, lying in a hammock—comfort, coziness. There are also reiterated scenes of sleeping and waking. In addition, there are juxtapositions and contrasts. In Chapter 10, Edna’s walk down to the beach with Léonce contrasts with her return with Robert. In a more distant comparison, the novella’s first scene with Edna’s return from bathing connects with its last scene in which she swims out to sea. There are also scenes of emotion as inwardly experienced. For instance, as Edna finds herself able to swim “a feeling of exultation overtook her.” Early versions of such feelings tend to be vague. They then become more distinct; so exultation transforms into a feeling of freedom from the role into which Edna has been cast: wife and mother.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Kate Chopin. (1894). “The dream of an hour.” In P. Knights (Ed.), <i>Kate Chopin </i>The awakening<i> and other stories</i>(pp. 259-261). Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition, 2000).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Kate Chopin (1899). <i>The awakening.</i> In P. Knights (Ed.), <i>Kate Chopin </i>The awakening<i> and other stories</i> (pp. 3-128). Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition, 2000).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Nicolai Gogol (1842). “The overcoat” (C. Garnett, Trans.). In <i>The overcoat and other stories</i> (pp. 3-51). London: Chatto & Windus (current edition 1923).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><div><a class="addthis_button" expr:addthis:title="data:post.title" expr:addthis:url="data:post.url"><img alt="Bookmark and Share" height="16" src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif" style="border: 0px none;" width="125" /></a>
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<!--AddThis Button END--></div>Keith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-38997173335123481112020-12-02T14:36:00.001-05:002022-12-06T09:13:35.094-05:00The Soul of Kindness<span style="font-family: Palatino;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq6hTYwpxUNVKZGuPQs9IoUSEHb86n0xJkgBgRU6sBTUFmDU9PorHmrszLVHpxCMZFUAZPKIemALVkuKRRN9g8nK9h1j0UBqo6BdwAwYUVCICtT6fd2Oobh-XmMPagjY4EcDsnTmVfVOzn/s1812/Eliz+Tayor+The+Soul+of+Kindness.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1812" data-original-width="1156" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq6hTYwpxUNVKZGuPQs9IoUSEHb86n0xJkgBgRU6sBTUFmDU9PorHmrszLVHpxCMZFUAZPKIemALVkuKRRN9g8nK9h1j0UBqo6BdwAwYUVCICtT6fd2Oobh-XmMPagjY4EcDsnTmVfVOzn/s320/Eliz+Tayor+The+Soul+of+Kindness.jpg" /></a></div></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">Elizabeth Taylor, born in 1912, was one of the most accomplished English novelists of the Twentieth Century. She can be thought of continuing in the way pioneered by Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf of depicting people’s inner lives but extending this to include several characters’ thoughts in relating and conversing with a set of other people who include relatives, friends, and lovers. She published twelve novels, a children’s book, and many short stories, which she conceived and thought about while bringing up two children. She was outraged by the fact that most male writers have not needed to divide their time in this way. So here, from her</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span><i style="font-family: Palatino;">A View of the Harbour</i><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span><span style="font-family: Palatino;">(1947) is Beth, a novelist on her way up to London on a train to see her publisher. </span><span style="font-family: Palatino;">"A man, she thought suddenly, would consider this a business outing. But, then, a man would not have to cook the meals for the day overnight, nor consign his child to a friend, not leave half-done the ironing, nor forget the grocery order as I have now forgotten it" (p. 186).</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></div><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">Elizabeth Taylor’s<i> The Soul of Kindness</i> (1964) can be regarded as a variation on Jane Austen’s <i>Emma,</i> in which the protagonist encourages others to marry. Elizabeth Taylor's novel starts with the wedding of Flora Secretan to Richard, a businessman. In the early part of the book Flora influences her best friend Meg to yearn for a sexual relationship with Patrick, a novelist, without seeming to know that, although he is willing to take Meg out for an occasional meal, it won’t go much further because he is gay. She also influences Richard’s father to marry his mistress, Ba; they do so and both find their lives much more boring than they had previously been. Meg’s brother, Kit, adores Flora and thinks of her as a goddess. He has been to drama school and has had one or two tiny walk-on parts. Although no one else thinks he has the slightest chance, Flora encourages him to believe that he will triumph and become a great actor. In Chapter 2, (p. 14 in the Kindle version) we read this: “she had inconvenient plans for other people’s pleasure, and ideas differing from her own she was not able to tolerate.” Then here, at the end of Chapter 2, are Flora and her new husband, Richard, in bed.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Palatino;">She was glad that there was a way of coaxing him out of his black humour. She turned him to face her, her silky arms around his shoulders. An end to the sulks. Benignly, she made a present of herself.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">Flora … the soul of kindness.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">Flora’s friend, Meg, works in an office in the middle of London but cannot afford to live in Kensington. So, with a small amount of money inherited from her father and some encouragement from Patrick, she moves into a little house that allows an occasional distant glimpse of the funnel of a ship passing on the river in an area that seems to be somewhere between Greenwich and Woolwich. Near this house lives Liz whose studio is upstairs from a deserted shop that is scheduled for demolition. Liz lives in the most awful mess: dead flowers, cow parsley, some feathers, dinner plates, sea-shells, all over the floor. But she paints pictures:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">The rubbish on the floor and about the room had been re-created, reassembled over and over again, into delicate and intricate patterns … there were also some pale girl children, with staring eyes (p. 39).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">The artistic arrangements are beautiful. It doesn’t seem to be an accident that the painter is called “Liz,” because here is a quote from the end of the Wikipedia article on Elizabeth:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #202122; font-family: Palatino;">The whole point is that writing has a pattern and life hasn't. Life is so untidy. Art is so short and life so long. It is not possible to have perfection in life but it is possible to have perfection in a novel.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #202122; font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">I don’t think </span><i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Palatino;">The Soul of Kindness</span></i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Palatino;"> </span><span style="font-family: Palatino;">is quite perfect, but it seems to me that aspects of it are. It does have a plot, but that’s not really what it’s about. It is a book that one needs to read slowly; it’s unlikely to work if you skip or speed-read. It depicts characters’ </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Palatino;">thoughts, then thoughts of what they might or might not say, maybe could say or should say … but instead they say something else which is sometimes a cliché, which isn’t quite what they meant to say but, because it’s been heard before, could possibly be alright. People’s beliefs and ideas about each other and about themselves also get passed around. At this book’s centre is the issue that although we human beings are completely dependent on our relationships, we often don’t quite know, and some of us seem unable to know, what effects we might have by saying certain things to others.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Palatino;">In this novel, too, are observations: as characters look at gardens and shops and houses. What they see, mingled with their thoughts of what they might say, is a multitude of English peculiarities. The result for the reader (at least this one) was quite a bit of giggling out-loud as I proceeded. In this book as well—rather touchingly depicted—there’s loneliness, particularly for Flora’s mother and for Flora’s friend, Meg.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Palatino;">The book’s principal focus is on self-absorption. Although, in Elizabeth Taylor’s <i>Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont </i>(1971)<i>,</i> there’s affection, there’s not much of it in <i>The Soul of Kindness</i>. Instead there’s reflection … prompted by the question of what we human beings are up to in our lives, and on how we search for meaning within ourselves and with each other.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 35.45pt; text-indent: -35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Jane Austen (1816). <i>Emma</i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition 2003).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 35.45pt; text-indent: -35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 35.45pt; text-indent: -35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Elizabeth Taylor (1947). <i>A view of the harbour</i>. New York: New York Review Books (current edition 2015). <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 35.45pt; text-indent: -35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 35.45pt; text-indent: -35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Elizabeth Taylor (1964). <i>The soul of kindness</i>. London: Virago (current edition 2010).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 35.45pt; text-indent: -35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 35.45pt; text-indent: -35.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Elizabeth Taylor (1971). <i>Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont</i>. London: Virago (current edition 1982).</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 35.45pt; text-indent: -35.45pt;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><div><a class="addthis_button" expr:addthis:title="data:post.title" expr:addthis:url="data:post.url"><img alt="Bookmark and Share" height="16" src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif" style="border: 0px none;" width="125" /></a>
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<!--AddThis Button END--></div>Keith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-63993582596393648852020-10-13T08:36:00.001-04:002022-12-06T09:13:50.294-05:00Reflection<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipwLbh82zGyzCAmIWEQCnAKVB-HpUKxcw3k_lZe3n-2ZeFhR5lHV2h2sXXu2roHHseIdmzvnhB69Cu16cE3M9nGBUeHqeibHnfQNzRu3YGUe3YSq1KYcVtxRGgPITQ9XiqMuAaGT7JR7SD/s1650/Mollie+Panter-Downes.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1650" data-original-width="1070" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipwLbh82zGyzCAmIWEQCnAKVB-HpUKxcw3k_lZe3n-2ZeFhR5lHV2h2sXXu2roHHseIdmzvnhB69Cu16cE3M9nGBUeHqeibHnfQNzRu3YGUe3YSq1KYcVtxRGgPITQ9XiqMuAaGT7JR7SD/s320/Mollie+Panter-Downes.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Mollie Panter-Downes became well known for her column in the<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">New Yorker</i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">on life in London during World War II (republished as</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">London War Notes</i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">). Her fifth novel,</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">One Fine Day,</i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">came out in 1947. Its title might have been</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">One Day,</i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">because that’s what it is: a day in the life of a family who live in an aging house, somewhere south-west of London, one year after the end of the War.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></div><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Here's the plot. Eight o’clock in the morning, the sun is shining. Laura and Stephen Marshall at breakfast. Stephen leaves the house, drives to the station to go up on the train to London, where he works. Their twelve-year old daughter Victoria goes to school. Laura, age 38, the main protagonist, goes on a bus to do some shopping in a nearby town. Provisions in short supply, coupons needed. She returns; does some stuff around the house, and in the garden, then in the afternoon rides on her bicycle to collect the family dog who has wandered off. Having collected him from where he sometimes goes, to a gypsy who lives with several dogs in an abandoned railway carriage, she climbs a small hill, and looks out over the countryside. She lies on the grass, falls asleep, with the dog on a lead beside her. It’s early evening when Victoria returns, having had tea with her friend Mouse Watson. Her mother isn’t home. Later, Stephen comes back from work. Laura still not home. Victoria finds some fish and cooks it. She and her father eat it for dinner. Both of them worried. Where can she be? Laura is woken by a noise. It’s a hiker whom she’d seen on the bus that morning. She sees how late it is; thinks of something she was going to tell her husband but can’t remember what. Thinks she’d better hurry home. That’s it. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">The middle of the novel is taken up with episodes, Laura’s meetings with people such as a working class family one of whom, George, is extraordinarily handsome, and might be able to do a bit of gardening but can’t because he’s going off elsewhere, and the Vicar, “a saint who had the misfortune to sound like a bore.” Incidents occur. And memories: Laura remembers a man she might have married but feels relieved that she did not. She sees huts that Canadian soldiers had lived in, sees holes in a wall where army trucks had bashed through. She has thoughts about this house and that one. It’s hard to imagine anything more redolent—I think that’s the word—of South-of-England upper-middle-class life in the aftermath of World War II. One could re-arrange some of the episodes and meetings without making much difference, because the sequence—morning, afternoon, evening—is not what this novel is about. At a deeper level it’s reflection: by Mollie, by Laura (with smaller pieces by Victoria and Stephen), and by us readers, on what it is to be human, on what our relationships within ourselves and with each other are all about.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">For me the novel succeeded in prompting reflection, but with some parts that didn’t quite work. And it is so very, very, English. But the inwardness did work, somewhat like Virginia Woolf, but warmer, more interpersonal.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">In his obituary of Mollie Panter-Downes, in the third of February 1997 issue of <i>The Independent,</i> Anthony Bailey reported her as saying, "I'm a reporter. I can't invent." What she was doing however was something that poets of the Tang Era in China did. Not invention, but perception of episodes in the world that are reflected in inner consciousness and writing (see OnFiction: “Patterns in the World and in the Mind,’ 9 January 2012; you can reach it by doing a search for “Tang” on the OnFiction home page). In Mollie Panter-Downes’s case, although some of her world is to do with nature, predominately it’s people.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Panter-Downes, M. (1947). <i>One fine day</i>. Current edition: London: Virago, 1985).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Panter-Downes, M. (2004). <i>London war notes</i>. London: Persephone.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Palatino;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><div><a class="addthis_button" expr:addthis:title="data:post.title" expr:addthis:url="data:post.url"><img alt="Bookmark and Share" height="16" src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif" style="border: 0px none;" width="125" /></a>
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<!--AddThis Button END-->Keith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-68860662747416807302020-09-21T13:35:00.003-04:002022-12-06T09:14:09.047-05:00Eleanor Oliphant<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjruCv4-1_S2k5anrLZAe3whc4lUCD9u5h0LzvbKLocj77ubewX4cw-9KefMlUc0IKAI-aYaH804bU-DzenHk3jyS5KU3eKYXhv-GHTuNGFO2C5737zT05J6sulkJCnwiZTWDpP5Xrtkxzz/s1646/Eleanor+Oliphant+Pic.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1646" data-original-width="1134" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjruCv4-1_S2k5anrLZAe3whc4lUCD9u5h0LzvbKLocj77ubewX4cw-9KefMlUc0IKAI-aYaH804bU-DzenHk3jyS5KU3eKYXhv-GHTuNGFO2C5737zT05J6sulkJCnwiZTWDpP5Xrtkxzz/s320/Eleanor+Oliphant+Pic.png" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Gail Honeyman said that the idea for her first novel, <i>Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, </i>came from two sources. One was reading an article about a woman in her twenties who lived alone in a big city. She would leave work on Friday and would often not speak to anyone until she returned to work on Monday. The other was how someone might manage if they were conversationally awkward. Eleanor Oliphant’s work and home life are similar to those of the woman in her twenties. And she is not just conversationally awkward but often inappropriate, sometimes rude. <o:p></o:p></div><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Eleanor was hired by Bob to work in the accounts office of a graphic design company in Glasgow. She has been there for nine years. She is clever and did a degree in classics. She gets the <i>Daily Telegraph, </i>not because she likes the newspaper but to do its cryptic crossword. She thinks she isn’t liked by the others who work in her office, which is probably right, because she can’t do small talk. At weekends she drinks vodka, so that Saturday and Sunday pass in a bit of a haze. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">On television one evening, she sees Johnnie, a musician. Immediately, she falls in love with him, because she can see from the three-piece suit that he wears and the way that he leaves undone the bottom button of his waistcoat, that he is a gentleman. He’s the one for her. He’s a musician and she knows that the moment they meet he will fall in love with her. She starts to make preparations to make herself look more beautiful. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Every Wednesday evening, Mummy gets in touch. In Chapter 4, Eleanor thinks that it was hardly surprising that her mother had been institutionalized, given the nature of her crime. During these conversations, Mummy is scathing and horrible but Eleanor tells her about this chap she is thinking of, and Mummy is encouraging. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">In her office, Eleanor’s computer malfunctions. She gets in touch with Raymond, a new bloke who has come to work in IT. He fixes the computer. Eleanor observes that he has scruffy hair, and a bit of a paunch. He wears running shoes, and silly t-shirts. He shaves infrequently and looks unkempt. Not only that but he smokes cigarettes. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">“How disgusting,” says Eleanor. “The chemical constitution of cigarettes includes cyanide and ammonia. Do you really want to willingly ingest such toxic substances?”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">Eleanor receives a visit from a social worker. This occurs every six months. She was in foster care from the age of ten. She lived with several families and didn’t get along with any of them. Because of her background she has been housed in a low-rent flat. This time the social worker is new; during her visit, as she flicks through her file on Eleanor, a look of shock comes over her.</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">One day, although they have only just met, Eleanor and Raymond find themselves leaving work at the same time. As they walk along, they see an elderly man staggering, then falling down in the street. Raymond goes to help him and gets Eleanor to do so as well. Although reluctant, she does. They call an ambulance, and the man is taken to hospital. They find themselves making visits to the old man in hospital. His name is Sammy. He tells them they saved his life. Just before they leave, one day, he takes Eleanor’s hands in his. This feels to her very warm and cozy.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Although love is the most popular topic in stories from all round the world—love of the sexual kind—this story is not about that. It’s not a love story, it’s a friend story. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">In Chapter 10, Raymond has invited Eleanor to go with him to visit his Mum, which he does nearly every Sunday. It involves Raymond going around his Mum’s house and doing everything that needs doing. She has terrible arthritis, but she keeps everything clean and neat, and is able to look after the vegetable garden in the backyard. Eleanor is asked to stay for tea, which she does. It’s soup with stock and vegetables from the garden. Lovely. Afterwards Raymond says he’ll do the washing up. Noticing Eleanor’s hands have eczema, he says that he would wash and she could dry. At one point, conversation among Raymond, his Mum, and Eleanor, turns towards Raymond’s dad, and how he lived long enough to see his daughter get married. Eleanor wonders why Raymond had not mentioned that he has a sister. His Mum asks her if she has any brothers or sisters. She says she hasn’t. She says that this is a source of sadness for her, and bursts into tears. Apologies all round. She says she never knew her father, and that she talks to her Mummy once a week. It all seems perfectly ordinary … it IS perfectly ordinary, except this is the first time that Eleanor has ever talked about herself to anybody.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">The novel also has an aspect of mystery. We wonder what happened to Eleanor, what had shocked the social worker, what the Wednesday evening conversations with Mummy are really about. We ask ourselves why Eleanor burst into tears when asked about a sibling. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Towards the end of the novel, Raymond says this: “I remember when I first met you … I thought you were a right nutter.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">“I <i>am</i> a right nutter,” she says.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">Then Raymond says: “Aye, sure you’re a bit bonkers—but in a nice way.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">And maybe that’s a bit like some of the rest of us.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; text-indent: -36px;">Gail Honeyman (2017). </span><i style="font-family: Helvetica; text-indent: -36px;">Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine</i><span style="font-family: Helvetica; text-indent: -36px;">. Toronto: Viking.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p><div><a class="addthis_button" expr:addthis:title="data:post.title" expr:addthis:url="data:post.url"><img alt="Bookmark and Share" height="16" src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif" style="border: 0px none;" width="125" /></a>
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<!--AddThis Button END-->Keith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-35358700275728185622020-06-24T11:50:00.003-04:002022-12-06T09:14:24.493-05:00Clarice Lispector<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt -7.1pt;">
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt -7.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "palatino";">The novella,</span><span style="font-family: "palatino";"> </span><i style="font-family: Palatino;">The Hour of the Star,</i><span style="font-family: "palatino";"> </span><span style="font-family: "palatino";">by Clarice Lispector, is unlike anything else I have read. This review can be thought of as following on from my previous post about authors hearing the voices of their characters, and characters having independent agency. It’s about the lives of someone called Rodrigo, an author-narrator who starts by thinking of writing a book (the one you would have in your hands as you read</span><span style="font-family: "palatino";"> </span><i style="font-family: Palatino;">The Hour of the Star</i><span style="font-family: "palatino";">) and the book’s protagonist, Macabéa, a nineteen-year-old woman, who is thin and not good-looking, who grew up a very poor area in the north-east of Brazil, who had only three years at school, then moved to Rio de Janeiro to be employed as a typist.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino";">Clarise Lispector was born in 1920, in the Ukraine, and her family moved to this same area in the north-east of Brazil, before moving to Rio de Janeiro.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino";">In the story Macabéa meets the arrogant Olímpico, with whom she falls in love. On page 38, the author-narrator says of him: “He had, I just discovered, inside of him, the hard seed of evil.” Later we read that he had killed someone in the north-east of Brazil, and that he was also a thief. A few pages later we read that when walking along with Macabéa, Olímpico says he is strong, so he lifts her into the air. She is euphoric: “what it’s like to fly in an aeroplane” she thinks. Then he dumps her in the mud. Then, another few pages on, Olímpico says to her: “are you just pretending to be an idiot or are you actually an idiot?” Macobéa: “I’m not sure what I am, I think I’m a little … what? … “I mean I’m not quite sure what I am.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino";">Then Olímpico goes off with Glória, a blond chubby girl who works in the same office as Macabéa. Feeling guilty, Glória recommends that Macabéa should visit a fortune teller, Madame Carlota, who sees in Macabéa’s cards that her life has been and continues to be horrible. Then she relents and tells her client that her life will be wonderful, that she will be courted and marry someone called Hans. Macabéa is enchanted. As she leaves the fortune teller’s place, and steps off the pavement, she is run over and killed by a large and expensive Mercedes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino";">As Colm </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">Tóibín</span><span style="font-family: "palatino";"> wrote in a very engaging review: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">In October 1977, shortly before her death, she [Lispector] published the novella <i><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; padding: 0cm;">The Hour of the Star</span></i> in which all her talents and eccentricities merged and folded in a densely self-conscious narrative dealing with the difficulty and odd pleasures of storytelling and then proceeding, when it could, to tell the story of Macabéa, a woman who, Lispector told an interviewer, "was so poor that all she ate were hot dogs". But she made clear that this was "not the story, though. The story is about a crushed innocence, about an anonymous misery." [Then], Lispector told a TV interviewer: "I went to a fortune-teller who told me about all kinds of good things that were about to happen to me, and on the way home in the taxi I thought it'd be really funny if a taxi hit me and ran me over and I died after hearing all those good things.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino";">But this novella isn’t about the plot. It’s about how Lispector the writer, created Rodrigo, the author-narrator, who created Macabéa as a character, and how this character in turn seems to take part in the process of creating not just author-narrator Rodrigo but also, perhaps, in a certain kind of way, Lispector. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino";">If we knew that that someone had decided to enter the police, or to be shop assistant or office worker, we might think that she or he had taken a decision, to become a person of a certain kind and that, in turn, the role she or he has taken on would shape something in that person. But an original idea of this novella, is that a somewhat similar process can occur with a writer and the story and characters that the writer decides to create. As we read on page 13 the author-narrator says: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino";">I have a fidgety character on my hands who escapes me at every turn expecting me to retrieve her … I see that north-eastern girl looking in the mirror and—a ruffle of the drum—in the mirror appears my weary and unshaven face. We’re that interchangeable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino";">Then on page 61 the author-narrator says to his readers:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino";">As for me I’m tired. Maybe of the company of Macabéa, Glória, Olímpico… I have to interrupt this story for about three days … For the last three days, alone, without characters, I depersonalize myself … as if taking off my clothes … and now I emerge and miss Macabéa. Let’s continue.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino";">But this novella is not just about this fascinating conversation among the writer, the author-narrator, the characters, and ourselves as readers. It’s a meditation on the nature of human life. It’s about how much we understand about others or understand about ourselves.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">Clarice Lispector (2011). <i>The hour of the star (second edition, with introduction by Colm Tóibín)</i> (B. Moser, Trans.). New York: New Directions.</span><span style="font-family: "palatino";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">Colm Tóibín (2014) Clarice Lispector's <i>The Hour of the Star</i> is as bewildering as it is brilliant. <i>The Guardian,</i> 18 January.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--AddThis Button END-->Keith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-3940113762006128922020-06-01T07:00:00.003-04:002022-12-06T09:14:42.006-05:00Lives of Characters<div style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
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<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "palatino";">In a recent article,<i> </i>John Foxwell, Ben Alderson-Day, Charles Fernyhough and Angela Woods (2020) report on a survey of writers’ experiences—as they are writing—of the characters they depict. In their first paragraph the researchers say:<o:p></o:p></span></div></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino";">A large number of writers report vivid experiences of “hearing” their characters talking to them, talking back to them, and exhibiting an atypical degree of independence and autonomy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino";">They follow this paragraph with quotations from well-known writers. This is the first: from Alice Walker.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">one or more of my characters … would come for a visit … They were very obliging, engaging, and jolly. They were, of course, at the end of their story but were telling it to me from the beginning. Things that made me sad, often made them laugh. Oh, we got through that; don’t pull such a long face, they’d say</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino";">And this from</span><span style="font-family: "palatino";"> Michael Frayn. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino";">It does seem—and I realise this is a psychological trick and it sounds very coy— but it is as if they are speaking and leading those lives. It’s a very symbiotic relationship. You do seem to be with people who have minds of their own, thoughts of their own, but at the same time you’re very much involved in leading their lives with them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">Influenced by ideas of this kind, Foxwell and colleagues surveyed 181 professional writers who attended the 2014 and 2018 Edinburgh International Book Festivals:</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";"> 81% were from the UK, 61% were women, and 66% wrote fiction. The researchers </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">asked them to answer a series of questions, which included the following. “</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">How do you experience your characters?” “Do you ever hear your characters’ voices?” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino";">Here are some the things writers replied about their characters speaking or relating to them. (Each number in parentheses indicates a writer in the survey.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">I hear them [my characters] in my mind. They have distinct voice patterns and tones, and I can make them carry on conversations with each other in which I can always tell who is ‘talking’. (R 33) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">I sense their presence as you sense somebody in a dream. They are very much known to me but only in peripheral vision and as an atmosphere or a force exerting itself. I wouldn’t be able to sit opposite a character, so to speak, and see them, talk to them etc. They aren’t something that can be interrogated or pinned down. (R 51)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">If the character feels something I feel it, whether emotional or sensory. (R 40)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">The researchers found that, while they were writing, 63% of writers surveyed could hear their characters speak.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino";">A further aspect of this survey followed up on a</span><span style="font-family: "palatino";"> study by Marjorie Taylor and colleagues, reviewed in OnFiction, on 12 August 2008. Here’s part of what I then wrote:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "palatino";">In fiction, readers engage with the characters, and wonder what they are up to …</span><span style="font-family: "palatino";"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "palatino";">It turns out that writers have some of the same experience as readers, of finding that their characters do things that seem appropriate, but without the writer having—as it were—to pull the strings. Marjorie Taylor, Sara Hodges & Adèle Kohányi (2002-2003) published a study based on interviews with 50 fiction writers to explore this question … All but four of them reported some experience of characters exhibiting apparently autonomous agency. </span><span style="font-family: "palatino";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">Here some things writers in Foxwell and colleagues’ survey said about their characters’ independent agency, in response to the question: “Do you feel that your characters always do what you tell them to do, or do they act of their own accord?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">I LOVE it when my characters go off script. It’s one of my favourite parts of being a writer, and often these unexpected plot twists are the best of all. (R 37)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">It’s the characters who make the thing happen. I can’t make them do what they don’t want to. (R 17)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">Foxwell and colleagues found that 61% of their writers said their characters could act independently.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">Overall, Foxwell and colleagues discuss their study in terms of all of us—humans—being able to understand something of what takes place in the minds of others: empathy and theory-of-mind. They conclude their article by saying:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">… the present study is, to our knowledge, the only survey of writers’ experiences of their characters which attempts to address the phenomenological complexity of these experiences within a large professional sample.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">Foxwell, J., Alderson-Day, B., Fernyhough, C., & Woods, A. (2020). “I’ve learned I need to treat my characters like people”: Varieties of agency and interaction in writers’ experiences of their characters’ voices. <i>Consciousness and Cognition, 79, </i>Article 102901.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">Frayn, M. (2011). Quoted in “On writing: Authors reveal the secrets of their craft.” <i>The Guardian.</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/26/authors-secretswriting" style="color: #954f72;">https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/26/authors-secretswriting</a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino";">Taylor, M., Hodges, S., & Kohányi, A. (2002-2003). The illusion of independent agency: Do adult fiction writers experience their characters as having minds of their own? <i>Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, 22</i>, 361-380.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">Walker, A. (1983). <i>In search of our mother’s garden.</i> New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino";">Image: Alice Walker (2007) Wikipedia.</span><span style="font-family: "palatino";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--AddThis Button END-->Keith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-78620621912671162012020-05-06T12:08:00.001-04:002022-12-06T09:14:58.826-05:00The Wire<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 1cm;">
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 1cm; text-align: justify;"><span face=""arial" , sans-serif">In OnFiction’s series of television series, we ought perhaps to have started with the series that really started it all: “The Wire.” It was conceived by David Simon, began in 2002, and ran for five seasons. Simon had worked for several years as a journalist on the newspaper,</span><span face=""arial" , sans-serif"> </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">The Baltimore Sun,</i><span face=""arial" , sans-serif"> </span><span face=""arial" , sans-serif">researching and writing about Baltimore’s police. Although he pitched “The Wire” to Home Box Office (HBO) as a cop show, as Margaret Talbot explains in her</span><span face=""arial" , sans-serif"> </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">New Yorker</i><span face=""arial" , sans-serif"> </span><span face=""arial" , sans-serif">article, “Stealing Life,” Simon said he thought about it as like a novel, in which each episode would be a chapter. A season would involve the development of character, an overall plot, perhaps with some digressions.</span><span face=""arial" , sans-serif"> </span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , sans-serif">One focus of “The Wire,” set in Baltimore, is on organizations in which not only do misunderstandings occur, but mistakes are made. Here the police are mirrored by a local drug gang. In both, higher-ups administer and sometimes take advantage of their positions. But, in these organizations, comradeship occurs. In this way, as police detectives, there are Bunk and his friend McNulty (seen in this image). Then one step up, Lieutenant Cedric Daniels, who gains a growing respect. Then further steps up, people with more power and less respect. In the drug gang’s organization, there’s a comparable hierarchy. The first season’s plot is the contest between these two organizations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , sans-serif">Near the beginning of the first episode of the first season we are in a courtroom, where a man at the gang’s mid-level, D’Angelo, is accused of having shot and killed someone (an underling drug-dealer in the gang). A witness changes testimony and D’Angelo is acquitted. Because getting him off had cost the gang time and money, he is demoted. The person who administers this is Stringer Bell, the gang’s organization person. Above him is the leader, Avon Barksdale (a companion of sorts to Bell). Both of them are very careful to avoid being seen or known by anyone in the police. (Although the gang’s business is of selling drugs, neither of these two, of course, ever indulges.) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , sans-serif">The title of the series refers to the police’s wire-tapping into telephone conversations among members of the drug-dealing gang. As Margaret Talbot points out, there’s also the implication that, as we watch, we are also tapping into the lives of these two groups of people. One effect, for viewers, is a growing understanding and empathy for some of the principal characters in both the police and the gang.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , sans-serif">Most of the people on the show are black. This is another focus, with the issue of how problematic it can be to live in working-class American cities: one of the preoccupations of the principal author, David Simon. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , sans-serif">Several groups of immigrants—Irish, Italian, Jewish—included people who, finding life in the New World at first very difficult, took part in illegal activities. They aspired to make enough money so that their children could go to college and lead middle-class lives. Because of institutionalized prejudice, this kind of issue has been far more problematic for black people, whose ancestors did not immigrate: they were transported. (How’s that for illegality?) In this show, in Episode 8, of the first season, entitled “The Lesson,” we see Stringer Bell taking a class in economics.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , sans-serif"> “The Wire” enabled television series-watching to be taken seriously, in the way that reading novels and watching certain kinds of films have become. And, as I wrote in OnFiction’s first review of television series (24 March 2020): “</span><span face=""arial" , sans-serif" lang="EN-US">As Jessica Black and Jennifer Barnes (2015) have shown … a prize-winning television series can have the same kinds of effects as reading fiction in enabling people to increase their empathy and understanding of others.”</span><span face=""arial" , sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , sans-serif">Jessica Black & Jennifer Barnes (2015). Fiction and social cognition: The effect of viewing award-winning television dramas on theory of mind. <i>Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 9</i>, 423-429.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , sans-serif">Margaret Talbot “Stealing Life,” <i>The New Yorker,</i> 15 October 2007.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--AddThis Button END-->Keith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-10114618689391852222020-04-17T11:05:00.001-04:002022-12-06T09:15:25.651-05:00Prime Suspect<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
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<div style="text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">To follow up from posts on 24 March and 1 April, here’s another one about a television series: </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Prime Suspect. </i><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Its protagonist, Jane Tennison, is one of the first women to reach the rank of Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) in the London Metropolitan Police. </span></div></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">A frequent idea of detective stories, especially police procedurals, is to follow a trail of clues, eventually to discover whodunnit, and have them put away, or as a judge might say, “sent down.” More deeply, however, as happens here, this kind of story is really about character and relationship.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">In character Jane Tennison, has intelligence, thoughtfulness, determination ... These have contributed to her ability to have risen in the hierarchy of the police. For eighteen months, since she achieved her present rank, she has been going into the police station each work-day, mainly to attend to paperwork, and waiting, waiting. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">The first episode of Season One of <i>Prime Suspect</i> starts with a bunch of police cars arriving, summoned to a flat, to see the dead body of a woman, thought to be Della Mornay. A pathologist attends, and amongst his findings is a spot of blood believed to be that of the perp (perpetrator). At the time of this series, before the days of DNA analyses, there were, however, blood groups. This spot of blood is of a very rare type. A man with this blood group is found on the police computer system, so Detective Chief Inspector John Shefford, an amiable man with a round face, goes with his men to visit him: the suspect, who immediately becomes prime, and is arrested. At the station Shefford questions this man who admits to having picked up Della, in order to have sex with her. In Shefford’s team, everyone’s pleased with themselves for having solved the case so quickly. Then as DCI Shefford begins to give his report on the case to his superior, Detective Chief Superintendent (DCS) Hernan, he suffers a terrible pain in his left arm, is taken off in an ambulance, and dies of a heart attack. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Jane Tennison asks DCS Kernan if she can take over the case and head up the enquiry. He says he’ll think about it. She tells him she’s been waiting a long time for an opportunity of this kind but has always been sidelined. Kernan goes another step up the hierarchy, to talk to his boss, Commander Traynor, who tells him he’s had a word with Tennison’s previous chief, in the Flying Squad. Traynor then tells Kernan that the Flying Squad chief reckons Tennison needs a break. Because of where this series was made (England), there need to be jokes; otherwise one cannot have any kind of proper relationship with anybody. So here’s the next bit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">“Female murder squad officer. Are you prepared to take the risk?” asks Commander Traynor.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">“Ball’s in my court, is it?” says DCS Kernan.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">“Flying Squad reckons she’s got ‘em.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">“What?” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">“Balls.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">So Tennison is appointed to head up the investigation into the murder of Della Mornay, much to the annoyance of almost everyone in the murder team. Then comes a video shot of about a dozen police in the incident room, all of them blokes. One of them, Detective Sergeant Ottly, starts plotting against Tennison, to try and sabotage her, because she’s a woman. Then as Tennison gets quickly onto the case, she turns up new evidence that the team had previously missed. Then, to members of the male-team’s chagrin, she orders the suspect to be released.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">So not just character, relationships: Tennison’s with her boss, her boss with the boss above him. Tennison with all the members of the murder squad, Ottly’s with Tennison. Tennison’s with her live-in boyfriend (under the stress of her new and often perplexing work-life). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Another thing, not always mentioned in discussions of detective stories, is the nature of the enquiries into what this person and that person (suspects, witnesses) were doing at this time and that time. People are interviewed in ways that rely on certain kinds of relationship—sometimes sympathetic, sometimes threatening—between detective and interviewee, which offer further insights, which we may not always be able to obtain in everyday conversation, into the character of different kinds of people who live in our societies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Prime Suspect</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> (1991-2006, seven seasons) Written by Lynda La Plante. (Available on BritBox.)</span><span face="calibri, sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<!--AddThis Button END-->Keith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-85102787024812090662020-04-09T12:26:00.001-04:002022-12-06T09:15:41.925-05:00Ross Day: The Book of Delights<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
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<div style="text-align: justify;"><span face=""arial" , sans-serif" lang="EN-US">I’ll postpone reviewing another television series until next week, in favour of a book of essays by Ross Day. Alright, these are not fiction, but they have many of its elements: character, emotional insight, inward thoughts, relationships. The author is someone who has published three books of poetry. One can think of poetry as the founding mode of fiction.<o:p></o:p></span></div></div>
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<span face=""arial" , sans-serif" lang="EN-US">There are 102 essays in this book, most of them a couple of pages long. Essay number 10, called “Writing by Hand,” (pp. 31-33), starts with the poet Derek Walcott giving a class on the writing of poetry. He asked people in the class who wrote by hand and who wrote by computer. Some people raised their hands to indicate that they wrote by computer, and Walcott said in his voice which Ross Gay describes as “mellifluous and curt,” that they should leave the workshop. So they gathered their things and started off down the hall. But before they got too far, Wallcott called them back: “C’mon, c’mon, I’m just making a point.” Ross Gay then reflects on what this point might have been. He says he writes his poetry and most of his essays by hand, but he also writes prose by computer. He says that computer writing can make words disappearable by use of the delete button, which may be best for “a good deal of florid detritus,” that can occur. But maybe these preliminaries shouldn’t just disappear because they have occurred on “the weird path towards what you have come to know, which is called thinking, which is what writing is” (pp. 31-33).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Another lovely essay is number 47, “The Sanctity of Trains” (pp. 134-135). Here Ross Gay reflects that when they are on trains, people often leave their bags and other stuff unattended for longish intervals, maybe to go to the washroom, or to the café several carriages away. On one train journey he noticed his neighbour, “across the aisle and one row up,” disappear “for a good twenty minutes, her bag wide open, a computer peeking out.” He calls the phenomenon “trust.” He writes that all through our social lives we are “in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking: “letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what’s too high, or what’s been dropped.” He finishes his essay like this. “This caretaking is our default mode and its always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--AddThis Button END-->Keith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-20222862130534622020-04-01T12:45:00.001-04:002022-12-06T09:15:56.973-05:00Borgen<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
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<i><span face="Arial, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Borgen</span></i><span face="Arial, sans-serif" lang="EN-US"> (which means “The Castle,” nickname for the building in Copenhagen that contains the Parliament, Prime Minister’s office, and Supreme Court) is a Danish series that is rather different from the usual kind aired on television. It has two kinds of focus. One is on gender and its implications in democratic political systems. The second is on how a job that is important, that demands unremitting involvement, can affect a person inwardly, and can affect that person’s relationships not just with others at work, but also with family and friends. So, as in many of the better kinds of novel, the central issue is character. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">The protagonist in the series is </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">Birgitte Nyborg, played by Sidse Babett Knudsen. Aged about 40, she is leader of a centrist party, the Moderates. A second protagonist is an ambitious television journalist, Katrine Fønsmark, played by Birgitte Hjort Sørensen. Although the series is about women, the writing team, Adam Price, Jeppe Gjervig Gram, and Tobias Lindholm, is all male. In an interview, Adam Price, the series originator, said that women in public life are not as unusual in Denmark as in some other places, and also that he thought the series would never travel beyond its home country. But it has; it’s been enthusiastically reviewed and widely appreciated.</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Episode One of the first season starts with the approach of an election, with the Liberal Party currently in power and the main opposition, Labour Party, with similar prospects of winning. The Moderates seem out of the race. Then it turns out that Katrine </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">Fønsmark has been having an affair with the current Prime Minister’s chief of staff, who dies during one of their meetings. On clearing up the chief of staff’s belongings, a receipt is found which reveals the Prime Minister’s financial wrongdoing. The receipt is given to Nyborg who refuses to have anything to do with it. Then it’s given to the Labour leader who very much likes showing off and presents it in a televised debate. Liberal and Labour support plummet. Suddenly, it seems Nyborg might become the new Prime Minister.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">In a world in which so many national leaders are older men it may be appealing that political decisions might be made by principled women, of whom there are some such as Angela Merkel. In this series, Knudsen plays Nyborg as someone who is thoughtful, who sometimes gets cross, but in personality is kind and considerate. As Knudsen acts this part we, in the audience, often see, in a smile at someone, or in a moment of hesitation, a depiction of a person whom we would very much appreciate as a political leader. And beneath this, as a principle of fiction, we are invited to think what this might mean for our understandings of political democracies, and of other people more generally, and of our selves. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">Borgen</span></i><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> (2010-2013, three-season television series). Written by Adam Price, Jeppe Gjervig Gram, and Tobias Lindholm. Denmark. (Available on services such as Apple TV.)</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--AddThis Button END-->Keith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-1323005412787763202020-03-24T13:12:00.001-04:002022-12-06T09:16:12.997-05:00Offspring<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
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<div style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">In these weeks of self isolation and social distancing with the corona virus pandemic what one may like, in the late evening, is a television series to watch before one goes to bed. Dating from 2002, when HBO (Home Box Office) an American television network started to broadcast <i>The Wire</i>, such series started, it seems, to have moved from soap operas to dramas that are more like novels, some with artistic features. Perhaps, indeed now, the television series released in episodes, in something like the way that novels used to be published in the nineteenth century, has become the print-novel’s newly embodied follow-up. As Jessica Black and Jennifer Barnes (2015) have shown, moreover, watching a prize-winning television series, can have the same kinds of effects as reading fiction in enabling people to increase their empathy and understanding of others (theory of mind). <o:p></o:p></span></div></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">So this week, and for some weeks to follow, I’ll offer suggestions with mini-reviews of some series that seem to me as good and worthwhile as many kinds of modern novel.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">For this first week, I suggest <i>Offspring,</i> an Australian television show conceived and written by Debra Oswald with two collaborators, which started in 2010 and runs through seven seasons, with 85 episodes, available on Netflix. The main protagonist in the series is Dr Nina Proudman (played by Asher Keddie, centre-left in this picture). At the beginning she is in her early thirties, an obstetrician whose professional skills range from super-competent to absolutely brilliant. And there are lots of engaging scenes of babies being born (so much better than the frequent televisual fare of men with guns). The second protagonist is her older sister, Billie Proudman (played by Kat Stewart, top right-hand corner in the picture); very out-there, sexy, sometimes aggressive, sometimes affectionate. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">Along with her professional activities, Nina, sometimes known as Nins, is usually in a bit of muddle personally. She has problems with her family (her sister Billie, her brother Jimmy, her mum, and her dad). She has friendly, and often very funny, interactions with other doctors, and with nurses, in her workplace, a hospital in Melbourne. And she falls love with people in ways that don’t quite work out.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">What is special, however, about this series, is its focus is on two aspects that had not quite emerged in the Nineteenth-Century novel. One of these—the main one—is Nina’s inner thoughts, edited into the action in a perfect way, so that although they are visualized and often spoken out-loud by the actress (Asher Keddie), as an audience member one knows instantly that they are Nina’s thoughts, memories, scenes of imagination, fantasies, and not aspects of her ongoing interactions with others. If we had been able to overhear Virginia Woolf, as she time-travelled from 1925 when she published <i>Mrs Dalloway,</i> to the first episode of <i>Offspring,</i> in 2010, we might have heard her whisper: “Yes.” The second aspect is the focus, not on events, not on what goes well or badly (although good and bad events happen), but on the relationships among the characters, which emerge and evolve. Lovely. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">Jessica Black & Jennifer Barnes (2015). Fiction and social cognition: The effect of viewing award-winning television dramas on theory of mind. <i>Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 9</i>, 423-429.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">Debra Oswald, John Edwards, & Imogen Banks (2010-2017). <i>Offspring.</i> Network 10. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">David Simon (2002). <i>The wire.</i> HBO Television Network.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";">Virginia Woolf (1925). <i>Mrs Dalloway</i>. London: Hogarth Press.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "palatino";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--AddThis Button END-->Keith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-15436426973312076742020-03-16T08:45:00.002-04:002022-12-06T09:16:29.249-05:00Research Bulletin: Is marathon TV viewing problematic? An overview of personality variables and viewer engagement in binge-watching<br />
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The trend of marathon television viewing, or "binging", refers to watching 2-6 episodes in one sitting (Netflix, 2013), and this has become a popular phenomenon among youth and adults alike. Although there is limited research on this area, binge-watching has often been associated with loneliness, depression, and social anxiety (Brechan & Kvalem, 2015). A recent study by Tukachinsky and Eyal (2018) sought to explore whether certain personality traits would be associated with binging, and whether binging predicts how viewers engage with the characters and story in a TV show. Depression, loneliness, attachment style, and lack of self-regulation were assessed in a group of undergraduate communications students. In addition, story engagement, character identification, enjoyment, and parasocial relationships with characters were measured as aspects of how viewers interact with the content. In a second study, these personality and viewer involvement variables were compared based on either a marathon viewing experience or a traditional viewing experience (one episode per week).</div>
<br /><div style="text-align: justify;">Overall, these studies found that the relationship between depression and binge-watching was partly explained by a lack of self-control, confirming previous research on this topic (La Rose, Lin & Eastin, 2003). In addition, people without a secure attachment style were more likely to binge-watch than those who were securely attached. Surprisingly, loneliness was not linked to increased binge-watching, although it has been previously shown that binge-watching can foster social connections and a sense of community (Perks, 2015). This study also found that binging viewers often engage with the content in meaningful, reflective ways, and also develop parasocial relationships with their favourite TV characters, perhaps more so than during a traditional viewing experience. This research may help to alleviate some concerns that binge-watching TV is a dysfunctional and problematic behaviour.<br /></div><div><br />Post by Sarah Skelding<br /><br />Photo by JESHOOTS.com from Pexels <br />
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* For a copy of the original article, please contact R. Mar (see profile for e-mail).<br /><br />References: <br />
<br />Brechan, I., & Kvalem, I. L. (2015). Relationship between body dissatisfaction and disordered eating: Mediating role of self-esteem and depression. <i>Eating Behaviors</i>, <i>17</i>, 49–58. doi:10.1016/j.Eatbeh.2014.12.008<br /><br />LaRose, R., Lin, C. A., & Eastin, M. S. (2003). Unregulated Internet usage: Addiction, habit, or deficient self-regulation? <i>Media Psychology</i>, <i>5</i>, 225–253. doi:10.1207/S1532785XMEP0503_01<br /><br />Netflix. (2013, December 13). Netflix declares binge watching is the new normal. <br />Retrieved from https://pr.netflix.com/WebClient/getNewsSummary.do?newsId=496<br /><br />Perks, L. G. (2015). <i>Media marathoning: Immersions in morality</i>. New York, NY: Lexington Books.<br /><br />Tukachinsky, R. & Eyal, K. (2018). The Psychology of Marathon Television Viewing: Antecedents and Viewer Involvement. <i>Mass Communication and Society</i>, <i>21</i>, 275-295. doi: 10.1080 /15205436. 2017.1422765<br />
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<!--AddThis Button END--></div>Raymond A. Marhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07521492403638340957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-78517813891084203582020-03-09T12:24:00.001-04:002022-12-06T09:16:44.296-05:00Andrea Levy's Short Stories<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
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<div style="text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">As with sonnets, some short stories have turning points. Andrea Levy’s “Deborah” has three. This story begins with a depiction of childhood play as good or better, on this, than anything I have read. Deborah is a friend of the narrator, Fern, whose mum, we infer, is an immigrant from Jamaica. Both girls are nine years old. They live a little way from each other on the ground floor of a block of council flats in Highbury, just north of Islington, in London. Deborah is one of a large family of twelve or so. She “has pale blue eyes” and “pink cheeks.” She sleeps with siblings in a room that has lots of beds. She is naughty, but also endearing, can always get a ball back when it is lost, hops over fences, can jump down ten stairs at a time. She loves to play with Fern. (What follow here are spoilers; if you don’t like these, please don’t read on.)</span></div></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Kenny, a much younger boy, lives on the third floor of the flats; “he was ginger and cried if you called him carrot.” He follows Deborah and Fern when he can. They sometimes let him come along, because—being scruffy and unattractive—he doesn’t have anyone else to play with. The three of them go into the flat where Deborah lives, into the room with lots of beds. It’s untidy: “Shoes, knickers and socks where pillows should be.” Instead of a light bulb, in the middle of the ceiling there’s a bundle of electric wires and flex, with leads going everywhere. The three kids play a game of showing each other their bums. Kenny is totally overexcited. He jumps up and down on a bed, waving his arms. By mistake, he knocks down the bundle of flex, and bits of the ceiling fall down, too.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">“Kenny, look what you’ve done,” shouts Fern.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">“I never did anything … I never touched nothing,” says Kenny.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Then comes the first turning point. Deborah burrows under a bed, on the floor, against the wall, sucks her thumb like a baby. Fern asks her to come out, but she won’t. Kenny calls her “scaredy cat” and “cry baby.” Fern then leaves “the room with the plaster and the dust and the black electric leads like spiders’ legs.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">At a second turning point, later that day, Fern sees Kenny naked. “His mouth … open as if screaming but with no sound coming out.” He has gashes and cuts all over his body, some of them oozing blood. Then she sees Deborah, walking after him, grinning, carrying a piece of flex with spikey metal ends. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Deborah is then no longer to be seen. Adults appear. They want to know where she’s gone. Deborah’s dad shouts, “when I get hold of her I’ll kill her.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">The police are called. Kenny is taken off in an ambulance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">In the story’s last paragraph comes the third turning point. It’s how Fern finds Deborah in a secret hiding place the two of them have, with her cardigan “pulled up over her head … in front of her face. She was sucking her thumb and rocking gently backwards and forwards. And coming out from between her legs was a small trickle of piss.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Although in the early part of the story it’s clear that Deborah does things she shouldn’t, we find that she has also learned what it is to be a bully. Beaten up perhaps by her father, or mother, perhaps by others, she beats up Kenny. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Another story in this collection is “That Polite Way that English People Have,” about a woman who emigrates to England from Jamaica. She has saved up to travel first class on a ship. She isn’t (quite) picked up by a posh-looking Englishman. He asks her if she would like a night cap. She says she doesn’t sleep with anything on her head. But Petal, another Jamaican woman, allows herself to be picked up. Now a turning point: in the boat’s first-class dining room, the posh man takes his meals with Petal, offers her cigarettes from a silver case. She whispers in his ear, and giggles. The narrator saw “the other English people looking at her [Petal] from the corner of their eyes. They were not used to someone as low class as she sitting right next to them … like she was as good as them.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Palatino;">A sense of humanity emanates from the essay and stories in this book by Andrea Levy who died about a year ago. </span><span style="font-family: Palatino;">In her stories, I think, she is wondering how we humans often seem unable sometimes to get on with each other. In the story “Deborah,” the turning points enable us to enter the mind of a child who has been abused. In other stories, turning points are based on shocks about how people do things, say things, or fail to say things, which indicate that they think it inappropriate for another person to receive the kind of consideration they would like for themselves. Most frequently this is based on social class or culture. But does that make it any better?</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Andrea Levy (2014) <i>Six Stories and an Essay.</i> London: Headline.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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