Abstract
This chapter gathers from diverse individuals personal accounts of their engagements with a wide range of fictional narratives. All of them encounter works of fiction having experienced loss, lack, or other hardship, whether personal or societal, that has induced a diminished sense of self. Their accounts show that fictional worlds have the capacity to meet an individual’s need, whatever its origin, providing models of a more robust agency in choosing a response to hardship and loss, the relief of resonant tangible expressions of inner emotional pain, or more capacious worlds making it possible to imagine a more empowered self. And thus these aesthetic engagements prove powerfully and invaluably self-focused, fiction reading that enlarges one’s self.
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Notes
- 1.
My interest in the effect on readers of their engagements with fiction sets my contribution apart from some others in this volume who also address questions of literature’s value. Günter Leypoldt, for instance, in Chap. 8 of this volume, helpfully differentiates between what he calls “strong” and “weak” value, the former being a more idealized, universalize-able standard or good, and the latter more individual or personal. In Leypoldt’s terms, my focus is on this “weak value,” specifically when readers attest to significant personal benefit resulting from encounters with fictional narratives including works whose “strong value” may be questionable.
- 2.
For a description of how and why I have students write about their own experiences with stories of all kinds see my essay “Learning Fiction’s Importance from Students in an English Classroom” in the forthcoming volume Deep Reading, Deep Learning. P. Sullivan, H. Tinberg, & S. Blau (Eds.), Peter Lang.
- 3.
A question in need of further inquiry is what enables these readers to transform their lives according to the “enlarged” selves they discover in fiction. Other readers I discuss in an earlier essay (2016) seem unable to become the selves they find in fiction and so want to remain in the fictional world to avoid feeling its loss, seeking more stories to sustain it.
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Bruns, C.V. (2022). A Self Enlarged by Fiction. In: Thumala Olave, M.A. (eds) The Cultural Sociology of Reading. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13227-8_12
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