Thursday, November 07, 2013

Hmm again …

… Should Literature Be Useful? : The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The results were heartening to every person who has ever found herself, throughout her freshman year of college, passionately quoting to anyone within earshot Kafka’s remark that great literature is “an axe to break the frozen sea inside us.” The subjects who had read literary fiction either reported heightened emotional intelligence or demonstrated, in the various tests administered to them, that their empathy levels had soared beyond their popular- and non-fiction-reading counterparts.

How do we know they weren't predisposed to be empathetic in the first place? Maybe that's why they like reading fiction.

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