Effects of foregrounding on moral disengagement and negative empathy – Bonasera (IGEL 2023)
Channel: IGEL Conference Videos
Date: 2023-09-10

This proposal builds on prior theoretical and empirical investigations on negative empathy to explore the effects of foregrounding on affective responses during reading. The study proposes a survey-based analysis of readers’ responses to original and manipulated excerpts of Nabokov’s Lolita and Littell’s The Kindly Ones , which feature unreliable immoral narrators. The hypothesis is that readers who are offered the original versions—possessing a high level of semantic, phonetic, and grammatical foregrounding—experience higher levels of empathic engagement with the main character than those who read the version without foregrounding, thus showing how style may contribute to the arousal of negative empathy.