Research Symposium

BIO

My name is Daniel Lang, and I am a first-year presidential scholar and pre-medical behavioral neuroscience major. I am from Miami, Florida and a member of PhiDE, the medical fraternity on campus. I am interested in research pertaining to cognition and working memory.

Reading and Feeling with Japanese Literature​: Light and Dark by Natsume Sōseki ​

Abstract

Though it is still debated amongst scholars, it has been proven time and time again that literature has the ability to invoke real world emotions in readers. Our research project serves to go beyond the validation of literature evoking emotion, and instead uses works of Japanese literature in English translation to determine how exactly the author uses words to invoke sympathy and empathy. The goal of our project is to locate and document passages in the narrative that invite the reader's sympathy/empathy. We were assigned to read Light and Dark by Natsume Soseki and The Makioka Sisters by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. Our team kept a digital reading log, where we typed out passages from the text that fit our literature review criteria, learning valuable proper citation skills in the process. These excerpts are our data where the author succeeds in drawing out real world sympathy and empathy and it is our job, alongside our research mentor Dr. Mewhinney, to figure out what skills and actions the author employs to invoke these emotions

Keywords: Japanese, Literature, Empathy