Graham Greene once said in an interview that too many of his characters left from the door by which they came in. In some of Greene’s fiction, though, change occurs: the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory and Holly Martins in The Third Man each leave by a door through which they did not enter. They have been transformed by their experience. What about ourselves as readers? Do we change in the course of a story?
A century ago many people thought that literature could change us, and be improving. We moderns may no longer be so sure. But we can turn the assertion into a question: can fiction be good for us? A small Toronto research group has started to investigate this kind of question and has found that reading fiction has worthwhile effects, including potentialities for the transformation of selfhood. We propose that fiction is a kind of simulation of the social world (you can read about the work of this research group at www.onfiction.ca)...
Keith Oatley is professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and winner of the 1994 Commonwealth Prize for Best First Novel. His most recent novel, Therefore Choose, was published in 2010 by Goose Lane. His recent books on Psychology include Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction (Wiley 2011) and The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories (Oxford University Press 2012). He wishes to thank his colleagues Maja Djikic, Jacob Hirsch, Raymond Mar, Jennifer de la Paz, Jordan Peterson and Sara Zoeterman.
Advertisement
Advertisement