Rethinking empathy through literature /
Hammond, Meghan Marie,editor.
Kim, Sue J.,editor.
"In recent years, a growing field of empathy studies has started to emerge from several academic disciplines, including neuroscience, social psychology, and philosophy. Because literature plays a central role in discussions of empathy across disciplines, reconsidering how literature relates to "feeling with" others is key to rethinking empathy conceptually. This collection challenges common understandings of empathy, asking readers to question what it is, how it works, and who is capable of performing it. The authors reveal the exciting research on empathy that is currently emerging from literary studies while also making productive connections to other areas of study such as psychology and neurobiology. While literature has been central to discussions of empathy in divergent disciplines, the ways in which literature is often thought to relate to empathy can be simplistic and/or problematic. The basic yet popular postulation that reading literature necessarily produces empathy and pro-social moral behavior greatly underestimates the complexity of reading, literature, empathy, morality, and society. Even if empathy were a simple neurological process, we would still have to differentiate the many possible kinds of empathy in relation to different forms of art. All the complexities of literary and cultural studies have still to be brought to bear to truly understand the dynamics of literature and empathy"--
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Introduction / Meghan Marie Hammond and Sue J. Kim -- Novel readers and the empathetic angel of our nature / Suzanne Keen -- Empathy aesthetics: experimenting between psychology and poetry / Susan Lanzoni -- Feeling your pain: exploring empathy in literature and neuroscience / Lauren Fowler and Sally Bishop Shigley -- Empathetic noise / John Melillo -- I object: autism, empathy, and the trope of personification / Ralph James Savarese -- "Hearing the speechless": empathy with animals in contemporary German lyric poetry / Eleonore De Felip -- Empathizing with the experience of cultural change: reflections on contemporary fiction on work / Sigrun Meinig -- Empathy and the unlikeable character: on Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Zola's Thérèse Raquin / Rebecca N. Mitchell -- "The great sum of universal anguish": statistical empathy in Victorian social-problem literature / Mary-Catherine Harrison -- Conformist culture and the failures of empathy: reading James Baldwin and Patricia Highsmith / Suzanne Roszak -- "More electrical than ethical": Joan Didion and empathy / Karen Steigman -- Humanizing the inhumane: the value of difficult empathy / Eric Leake -- Empathy and gender activism in early modern Spain: María de Zaya's Amorous and exemplary novels / Isabel Jaén -- Irony as cognitive empathy: mind-reading Tom Jone's narrator / Nathan Shank -- Gertrude Stein and empty empathy / Meghan Marie Hammond -- Paradoxical worsening of empathy: ambassadorial science journalism and The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks / Sarah L. Berry.
"In recent years, a growing field of empathy studies has started to emerge from several academic disciplines, including neuroscience, social psychology, and philosophy. Because literature plays a central role in discussions of empathy across disciplines, reconsidering how literature relates to "feeling with" others is key to rethinking empathy conceptually. This collection challenges common understandings of empathy, asking readers to question what it is, how it works, and who is capable of performing it. The authors reveal the exciting research on empathy that is currently emerging from literary studies while also making productive connections to other areas of study such as psychology and neurobiology. While literature has been central to discussions of empathy in divergent disciplines, the ways in which literature is often thought to relate to empathy can be simplistic and/or problematic. The basic yet popular postulation that reading literature necessarily produces empathy and pro-social moral behavior greatly underestimates the complexity of reading, literature, empathy, morality, and society. Even if empathy were a simple neurological process, we would still have to differentiate the many possible kinds of empathy in relation to different forms of art. All the complexities of literary and cultural studies have still to be brought to bear to truly understand the dynamics of literature and empathy"--
Empathy in literature.
Literature
Sociology in literature.