"The Reluctant Fundamentalist" by Moshin Hamid: suggesting a method to investigate readers' empathetic engagement with postmodernist literary fiction

Abstract

This paper discusses the readers' empathetic engagement with postmodernist fictional characters, focusing on "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" by Moshin Hamid. Specifically, it first introduces postmodernism as a "contradictory" cultural phenomenon (Hutcheon, 2004, p.3; Jameson, 1991, p.12), comparing Frederic Jameson’s and Linda Hutcheon’s definitions. Then, it examines the emergence of reader-oriented criticism, an approach to literary studies concerning readers’ responses to narrative texts, which developed in the postmodern period with scholars Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. However, this paper questions the effectiveness of reader-oriented methods in the investigation of the audience's processing of postmodernist literary fiction, as they lack a workable methodology. In this respect, it suggests that psychonarratology has emerged as a method to supply the deficiencies of reader-oriented theories, combining theoretical and empirical evidence. Thereby, after explaining the reasons why "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" (Hamid, 2007) may be regarded as a postmodernist novel, specifically as a post-9/11 "historiographic metafiction" (Hutcheon, 2004, p.ix), this paper offers an analysis of readers' empathetic response to the novel's "strange narrator" (Caracciolo, 2016, p.1) Changez, providing some empirical insights into the audience's processing of narrative. In this way, it is possible to show that the audience's empathetic engagement is problematized through negative empathy and cognitive dissonance.