Creative Writing as a Community-Creating Act?

:speech_balloon: Speaker: Paul Sopcak @Paul

:classical_building: Affiliation: MacEwan University

Title: Creative Writing as a Community-Creating Act?

Abstract (long version below): This symposium explores the transformative potential of creative writing in fostering empathy, self-understanding, and social cognition. Diverse approaches will be presented, including: phenomenological perspectives on intersubjectivity and empathy; the emotional and psychological benefits of poetic autoethnography; and comparisons between the effects of literary reading and creative writing on empathy. The presentations investigate how literary writing practices can promote personal growth, deepen emotional clarity, and enable individuals to vividly simulate others’ perspectives. Together, these presentations aim to highlight creative writing’s power in bridging individual experiences, enhancing emotional insight, and fostering greater interpersonal understanding and connection.


:movie_camera:


:newspaper: Long abstract

Despite the recent surge of second-person accounts (“you turn”), simulation theory remains the reigning paradigm to explain intersubjectivity, empathy, and social cognition. In general, simulation theorists agree that we gain an understanding of others’ mental states by either implicitly (resonance mechanisms; “mirror neurons”) or explicitly (cognitive perspective taking) pretending to be in their mental shoes in response to perceived bodily expressions, and then project the resulting mental state(s) back onto the other. Practicing this form of social simulation through, for instance, creative writing, would then potentially expand our empathic boundaries and enhance our social cognition.
An explicit aim of this symposium is to “examine the potential of creative writing practices to help individuals more vividly simulate others’ perspectives [to ultimately] promote greater empathy and understanding” (de Seta & Hakemulder).
In the proposed presentation, I offer a phenomenological alternative to simulation theory-based accounts of creative writing’s potential impact on empathy. According to Husserl (1973), intersubjectivity and empathy are primordially based on a “community creating act that in Latin is simply called communicatio,” which is a an “intention and will to intimate” and a “specific act … of communicating oneself” (p. 473; second emphasis mine, trans. Zahavi, 2019). Importantly, the creation of such “we-experiences” also involves a form of self-alienation and change in self-understanding through experiencing oneself from an outside perspective (Zahavi, 2019). Although Husserl and many phenomenologists after him (e.g., Sartre, Stein, Zahavi) place the face-to-face encounter at the heart of this theory of intersubjectivity and experienced community, I argue that it provides a nuanced and sophisticated model for explaining creative writing’s potential to expand empathic understanding.

References

Husserl, E. (1973). Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität III. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil. 1929–1935, Husserliana 15, ed. I. Kern. Martinus Nijhoff, Den Haag.
Zahavi, D. (2019). Second-Person Engagement, Self-Alienation, and Group-Identification. Topoi, 38(1), 251–260. Second-Person Engagement, Self-Alienation, and Group-Identification | Topoi

2 Likes

Yes!!! Great work!!! I look forward to reading your paper!!! This is very much needed. Take care, good luck on your project! All best wishes

I just want to ask about which communities you are focusing on in this research; I am not a phenomenologist, so apologies if this is not quite the discussion you were aiming for.

In my own research and creative practice, I am aware that I am writing poems which attempt to foster a relationship and community between the poem’s speaker (who may be a version of myself, or an attempt to distance myself from a poem’s speaker) and the reader, but also that the creation of a poem or other piece of creative writing is creating a community in the course of the creative process (e.g. which other writers have inspired the act of writing, which of my peers have looked over the work for editing, which publishers will consider my work and foster more edits, do I share the work verbally at a reading event, etc.)

More thoughts than questions, I suppose, but does Creative Writing not create multiple communities which can overlap?

Hi Caspar, I’ll provide a similar response here to the one I provided in the Zoom chat yesterday. The communicatio is a necessary condition for empathic engagement and by extension community creation. For Husserl it is essential to any “we” experience. So, no specific communities in mind. I hope that is helpful. Thanks for your interest.

1 Like

Thanks for your kind words, Olivia. All the best to you, too!

That’s very useful. Thanks Paul.

I posted this before you answered in the conference, so please don’t feel like I’m pestering you.