City of Asylum @ Alphabet City, located at 40 West North Avenue, is the permanent home for City of Asylum programming and the arts. It is a hub for Pittsburgh’s readers and writers, jazz and small-scale music and performance, and artistic experimentation. It is a home for diverse voices from around the globe – a place where Pittsburgh meets the world and the world meets Pittsburgh. To view a complete list of all scheduled events, visit the Alphabet City website.
Relatable: Empathy, Novels, and Picky Readers
Sunday, October 7 from 6:00 to 7:30 pm
Learn about Relatable: Empathy, Novels, and Picky Readers during a talk with Suzanne Keen. This lecture centers on narrative empathy: the capacity of narrative fiction to invite readers into unfamiliar worlds, where they can be asked to share the imagined experiences, perspectives, and emotions of characters. Narrative fiction has the ability to evoke empathy. By definition, a work that inspires narrative empathy is, at least temporarily, “relatable.” But what’s going on when students deem a novel “relatable,” or worse, “unrelatable”?
