Literature as Window

This article argues that fictional literature can be a useful device for developing greater understanding and improved communication among people from different cultural, racial, and ethnic groups. Literary works possess the capacity to induce reader identification with the characters in a story, thereby providing emotional involvement in the actions, feelings, and motivations of the people in the narrative. Moreover, literature normally invites explanation and description of the cultural and social context in which the story occurs, thereby enhancing the reader's awareness of values, customs, and communication patterns that may differ sharply from his or her own. While such cognitive developments as knowledge of a new culture could be gained from anthropological studies and social science textbooks, the appeal of fiction stems from its presentation through a medium that is at once dramatic and entertaining. As Picasso once suggested, art is a lie that helps us see the truth more clearly. To demonstrate the evocative power of fiction to promote interracial understanding, this article will use Things FallApart by contemporary Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe as a case study

Aesthetics · Appeal · Art · Context (archaeology) · Ethnic group · Feeling · Identification (biology) · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Power (physics) · Presentation (obstetrics) · Sociology · Anthropology · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · History · Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology

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