10 word pitch 2

Pairing up words and relating them to my project

Fiction and Sanctuary

Fiction is often described as a sanctuary, a place to hide away from the circumstances of your own life. It can form a place to retreat to and find comfort, a new world to immerse yourself into. In my research and my essay I have been looking at the uses of fiction and how it can effect us, Some theorists believe it is purely an escapist activity and a way to ignore or hide from our real life responsibilities. In the quote from Neil Gaiman that started off my researching he says that fiction provides us with tools and weapons that we bring back into our real lives to help us deal with the world around us. From my research it would appear that the effect of fiction goes far beyond providing escape for the individual and that it may have had an important impact on the way societies function. my research suggests that fiction can act as a sanctuary but is much more than that and its influence is much more profound and far reaching.

Escapism and Society

The term escapism applies to a variety of activities from playing computer games to recreational drug use, it is often viewed in a negative light and seen as hiding away or ignoring responsibilities. There are clearly negative aspects to a number if not all of the activities if they start to take over an individuals life but here are important positive effects that are often overlooked. In a modern society where we are bombarded with information every minute of everyday it is important to take time out to process this information and make sense of the world around us, escapist activities often form the basis of these times. Escapist fiction, whether in the form of a book, film or television programme has a powerful effect on our beliefs and how we relate to other people around us. Works of fiction have played a part in huge social and political reforms since the invention of the printing press allowing us to understand experience and understand situations and perspectives different from our own.

Empathy and Emotion

Empathy is directly associated with fiction, studies show that individuals that read or watch fiction regularly show higher levels of empathy than an individual that doesn't. Empathy allows associate ourselves with situations we have never experienced and feel to some level the emotion of another person making it easier for us to see their point of view. This seems like a positive effect of escapism/fiction but there are issues with using empathy as a way to make decisions. Empathy does not allow us to feel a connection with a large number of people, we will feel more strongly about one person who we know something about than 100 people that we know nothing about and therefore value there life more. Studies show that we are more likely to empathise with some we have something in common with nationality, skin colour, language etc or someone who we find attractive.

Empathy can also have a detrimental effect on our emotional state, because we fell the emotion of the person we empathise with we can end up taking on too much. Women show higher levels or empathy than men and also higher levels of depression, taking on the pain of everyone around you can have serious emotional implications.

Just World and Beliefs

Fiction and escapism can have a profound effect on our beliefs and may also have an effect on how our society functions, it could be argued that without function the society we live in would not function at all. In the vast majority of works of fiction we are shown a world that is governed by the just world hypothesis. A world where good people are rewarded and bad people get what they deserve in the end, and this affects our beliefs and our behaviour. We are nice to people we meet we perform good deeds that make use feel better because that is what we are supposed to do. The problem is that the world is not just, bad things happen to good people all the time and bad people often prosper (most crimes go unpunished). But if we all acted in these destructive ways and tried to gain all we could from society having no care for anyone else would society still function? Studies show that people that watch/read fiction will conform to just world beliefs and show higher levels of empathy than people that watch/read the news and other non fiction.

Bias and Objectivity

Empathy allows us to share the emotion and situation of other people and the span of empathy has been extended through fiction since the dawn of mass printing. We are able to understand situations we have never been in and see through the eyes of people we have never met. Unfortunately empathy is inherently biased and does not provide us with a perfect model for social policy. Empathy does act as a weapon against selfishness but can cause problems if used to decide public policy. We need to be able to understand that the life of someone we do not know in a far away land is as important as our neighbour and that 100 lives are more important than one, to make these decisions we would need to put our emotional bias caused by empathy to one side and think objectively.