Speaker: Gabriele Vezzani @g.vezzani
Affiliation: RWTH Aachen University & University of Verona
Co-author: Simone Rebora
Title: Empathic Engagement Between Readers’ Ethnicity and Narratives’ Literary Prestige
Abstract (long version below): Scholars of postcolonial studies have highlighted the role played by identity features in both the production and the reception of literary works. In this paper, we apply computational methods to a corpus of reviews of South-African post-colonial novels, downloaded from the Goodreads platform, in order to assess the influence of sociocultural and intersectional factors on the level of identification potential of narratives. In particular, we investigate the effect, on the one hand of the reader’s ethnicity and, on the other, of the work’s literary prestige on the empathic transportation elicited by narratives in the reader.
Long abstract
Introduction
By stressing the role played in literary reading by intersectional factors, postcolonialism makes a claim that, though intuitive, is all but uncontroversial. Indeed, the relationship between literature and its readers is a complex phenomenon, and many would still be recalcitrant in accepting its ‘reduction’ to matters of, say, ethnicity or gender. For instance, supporters of a universalist view, as discussed by Larson (1973) or Ashcroft and colleagues (1989), would argue that literature deals with a universal essence of humanhood that transcends such categorizations.
Here, we set out to empirically assess these problems, by isolating and studying the roles played in eliciting readers identification by:
a) convergence of readers’ and writers’ ethnicity;
b) literary quality of the work itself.
We decided to take readers’ empathic engagement with the text as a proxy for their identification with it and hypothesized (H1) that readers would show a greater empathic response to authors coming from their own area. Conversely, if literature were indeed above race-dynamics, we should expect (H2) readers’ empathic response to depend solely on the quality of what they read – a concept that we operationalized by focusing on the literary prizes that each book either won or was nominated for.
Data
The books that formed our corpus were selected from the Goodreads platform according to the following criteria:
• They had to be tagged, by more than two people, with a tag relating them to the region of Southern Africa. In particular, works in our corpus are tagged by at least one of the following tags: “south-african”, “south-africa”, “botswana”, “zimbabwe”.
• They had to be tagged, by more than two people, with a tag relating them to postcolonialism (“post-colonial”, “postcolonialism”, “postcolonial-colonial”, “colonialism”).
This way, we formed a corpus of 48 titles, by 27 different authors. We then gathered information about the prizes that each book won or was nominated for, as they were reported on the Goodreads platform. We scraped a total of 5993 reviews pertaining to the books in our corpus, written by 3749 different subjects in a timespan ranging from 2007 to 2023. Reviewers come from 124 different countries, with an average of 48 reviewers per country.
Analysis
We based our analysis on a study by Yaden and colleagues (2023), who found that the level of empathy displayed by subjects was correlated with the frequency, in their speech, of words pertaining to10 specific LIWC categories. Based on this, we computed for each review an empathy-score with a weighted sum of the frequencies of each one of these 10 LIWC categories, multiplied by the β coefficient that quantified the strength of their respective correlation with empathy.
With reference to H1, a significant difference was found between the empathy scores of Southern African reviewers and those of foreign ones (u = 1146510.5, p < 0.001, rpbi = -0.14), favoring the first group, whose mean was 0.15 points higher. With respect to H2, books that won literary prizes scored lower in terms of empathy (u = 3749895, p < 0.001 , rpbi = -0.08).
Discussion
The fact that we were able to detect a significant difference between the empathy scores of Southern African and foreign reviewers confirms our hypothesis (H1) that ethnicity plays an important role in readers’ engagement with narratives. In particular, it appears that sharing the author’s region of provenance leads readers to appreciate the book more and to have a higher empathic response to it. Literary prestige has also been found to influence the empathic response elicited by the book. However, contrary to what could be hypothesized from the standpoint of an essentialist view of literature (H2), books that won literary prizes tend to elicit a smaller empathic response than the ones that did not.
We believe that this last result speaks about the sociocultural criteria behind the awarding of a literary prize, namely about the fact that critics may associate literary quality with more thoughtful and less emotionally moving narratives, and thus award the books that reflect such a quality. Furthermore, our findings are in line with research in the field of neurocognitive poetics (Jacobs 2015), which conceptualizes literary texts as composed by:
a) backgrounding elements, which activate readers’ familiar cognitive schemata and, by facilitating immersion into the story-word, can increase their empathic response (Bal & Veltkamp 2013, Walkington et al. 2020);
b) foregrounding elements, which, by presenting readers with unusual and unexpected stylistic strategies, elicit in them an aesthetic response.
Accepting this theory, and assuming that empathic and aesthetic responses are elicited by separate sets of features, we can expect books awarded with literary prizes to constitute a sample characterized by a more aesthetic aim, and thus to rely more on foregrounding elements than on backgrounding, empathy-inducing ones. This would explain the negative effect that in our corpus literary prestige has on empathic engagement.
References
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (1989). The empire writes back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures. Routledge, London; New York
Bal, P. M., & Veltkamp, M. (2013). How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation. PLoS ONE, 8(1), e55341. How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation
Jacobs, A. M. (2015). Neurocognitive poetics: Methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of literature reception. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9. Frontiers | Neurocognitive poetics: methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of literature reception
Larson, Charles R. (1973). Heroic Ethnocentrism: The Idea of Universality in Literature. He American Scholar, 2(3), 463–475.
Yaden, D. B., Giorgi, S., Jordan, M., Buffone, A., Eichstaedt, J. C., Schwartz, H. A., Ungar, L., & Bloom, P. (2023). Characterizing empathy and compassion using computational linguistic analysis. Emotion. APA PsycNet
Walkington, Z., Wigman, S. A., Bowles, D. (2020). The impact of narratives and transportation on empathic responding. Poetics, 80(4), 101425.