Novelists aim to jolt the heart and dispose readers to otherness

Evidence

Ahdaf Soueif, “In Times of Crisis, Fiction Has to Take a Back Seat,” Guardian Review, August 18, 2012. The novelist Sue Monk Kidd writes, “While, as a writer, I want to affect the reader’s mind … what I wish for even more is to jolt the reader’s heart. I want my words to open a portal through which the reader may leave the self, migrate to some other human sky and return ‘disposed’ to otherness” (quoted in Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], 124). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 546

Categorization

• FICTION: A potential epigraph or framing device for the essay on how fiction persuades.
• XREF: Do these affective claims about empathy hold for The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Home Boy, or does irony complicate the ‘disposed to otherness’ aspiration? — connects to: Writers must administer linguistic shocks to overcome readers’ numbed sense of the concrete — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 63