WhenThe Old Curiosity Shopwas approaching its emotional climax -- thedeath of Little Nell -- Dickens was inundated with letters imploring him to spare her, and felt, as he said, "the anguish unspeakable," but proceeded with the artistically necessary event. Readers were desolated. The famous actor William Macready wrote in his diary that "I have never read printed words that gave me so much pain. . . . I could not weep for some time. Sensations, sufferings have returned to me, that are terrible to awaken."Daniel O'Connell, the great Irish member of Parliament, read the account of Nell's death while he was riding on a train, burst into tears, cried "He should not have killed her," and threw the novel out of the window in despair. Even Carlyle, who had not previously succumbed to Dickens's emotional manipulation, was overcome with grief, and crowds in New York awaited a vessel newly arriving from England with shouts of "Is Little Nell dead?"

David Cody, from hiswebsite on Dickens' popularity

I read somewhere that when the boat with the latest installment ofThe Old Curiosity Shoparrived in New York, there was a crowd a block deep waiting to find out what happened to Little Nell. Those closest to the boat found out that she had died, and as the message filtered back through the crowd a visible wave of horror and despair followed, with people breaking down in tears.

小说对我们情感的控制是如此之强。这些人认为小耐尔是真的吗?不客气。他们知道这是伟大作家狄更斯的小说;不然他们为什么要怪他杀了她?这是我们将在下一期哲学讨论中面对的令人困惑的事情:小说和其他艺术形式对我们情感的控制，即使我们知道它们描绘的人物和事件不是真实的。中国伊朗亚洲杯比赛直播

I saw the movie "Capote" the other day . I thought it was excellent. Stanford grad Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays Truman Capote. I've been a fan of his since his days in the little theatre up in the attic of Memorial Auditorium.

The relevance of this to the current topic is Capote's "non-fiction novel,"In Cold Blood. Capote invented the non-fiction novel, where actual events are described with all of the tricks of the novel-writers' craft. The event depicted is the murder of the Clutter family, on farm on the outskirts of a small town in western Kansas, in 1959. I lived in Lincoln, Nebraska at the time, where just a year or so before Charles Starkweather, who had been my brother's classmate at Irving Junior High School, went on his famous rampage, killing ten or elevant people over a couple of days. I suppose in today's world a serial killer who doesn't make it to a dozen, or a simple murder of a family in Kansas, would hardly make the front page of theNew York Times, as the Clutter murder did. Still, in the great plains, these events were well-known.

A few years later, when I readIn Cold Blood, I was much more affected by the Clutters' murders, as described there, than I had been at the time. I was even more affected than I had been by the Starkweather murders, even though two of them were people I had met at church, and another was a client of my father whose farm I had visited. Well, maybe that's not surprising, because Capote was a gifted writer, and his description of the Clutter murders was more detailed and personal than the accounts in the papers. But the interesting thing is that I don't believe I was anymoreaffected in reading about those murders than I have been, hundreds of times, reading about murders I know to be pure fiction. What Husserl (to bring in a little philosophy) would call thethetic卡波特的描述在我心中唤起的思想的一个方面，也就是说，它们是我提出并认为是对真实发生的事情的描述，这与我的反应没有太大关系。

读到克拉特夫妇的故事时，我相信这件事的发生与我的情绪无关。But why doesn't the fact that we know thatThe Old Curiosity Shopis fiction get in the way of having the full complement of emotions appropriate to the death of an innocent child when we read about Little Nell? How can such emotional impact co-exist withdisbelief在我们读到的事件中?

有一句话可以回答这个问题，那就是“自愿中止怀疑”。总共多少钱?它与小说有什么关联?这些是我们将在周二的哲学讲座中讨论的问题:艺术和怀疑的中止。中国伊朗亚洲杯比赛直播