Narrative Humanism

Outlines an approach for reading fictive texts focussed upon the politics of human kindness

• Read the blog post An interview with Wyatt Moss-Wellington, author of 'Narrative Humanism' and co-editor of 'ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze'
• Provides scholarly resources for evaluating the ethics, politics and psychology of our attempts to capture the complexity of other lives in narrative
• Offers a critique of post-Foucaultian literary and film theory, demonstrating how it is possible to make the conditions of human altruism (rather than its converse, power relations and exploitation) central to our analytical work
• Broadens the scope of cognitive media theory, reintegrating some of cognitive science's formative disciplines
• Details both a "humanist hermeneutics", a practical guide to performing humanist readings of narrative texts and "social narratology", a taxonomy of the social functions of fiction
• Demonstrates the use of narrative humanism in two case studies at the level of genre theory (the suburban ensemble film), and close reading (Ron Howard's 1989 film Parenthood)
• Distinguishes a narrative-based humanism from related philosophies, including Renaissance humanism and contemporary secular humanism

This book attempts to clarify the narrative conditions of humanism, asking how we can use stories to complicate our understanding of others, and questioning the ethics and efficacy of attempts to represent human social complexity in fiction.

With case studies of films like Parenthood (1989), American Beauty (1999), Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and The Kids Are All Right (2010), this original study synthesises leading discourses on media and cognition, evolutionary anthropology, literature and film analysis into a new theory of the storytelling instinct.