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"Sympathy"
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Editorial
Although the phrase “please allow me to introduce myself” can perhaps no longer be uttered without calling forth the Lucifer figure that the Rolling Stones sing about in “Sympathy for the Devil,” I can't think of a better line to greet Transfers readers and tell you a bit about myself as I assume editorship of the journal. Whatever you think of that Satanic scamp, one must admit that he got around, geographically and temporally, and that traveling with him was almost certainly never boring.
Journal Article
Sympathy and the 'Fallen Woman' in the Victorian Novel, from Elizabeth Gaskell to Thomas Hardy
This thesis focuses on the significance of sympathy in representations of the 'fallen woman' in the Victorian realist novel. Beginning with Gaskell's Ruth (1853) and ending with Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895), I explore the ways in which authors sought to encourage their readers to feel sympathy towards the fallen woman, and moreover, how the nature of sympathy is shaped by the writers' narrative strategies and prevalent cultural attitudes towards women and their sexuality. Critics have typically argued that Victorian novelists adhered to Adam Smith's model of sympathy - which understands sympathy as essentially self-reflexive - and are thus sceptical of sympathy leading to acts of kindness. However, this thesis argues that 'fallen woman' novels present a more complex case. In their fascination with the difficulty of sympathy, such texts evoke the reader's sympathy in the act of struggling to understand the 'fallenness' of these characters. The thesis examines novels that are notable for the diverse ways in which the fallen woman is placed within their narratives. Gaskell's Ruth, Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Moore's Esther Waters (1894) are centred on their fallen woman heroines, while in Eliot's Adam Bede (1859), and Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Jude the Obscure, the fallen woman is a minor or secondary character. In doing so, I reveal how these novels function to extend the reader's sympathy to those outside of their familiar group, drawing upon Raymond Williams's concept of the 'knowable community'. The concluding chapters explore how the transition at the end of the nineteenth century from the 'fallen woman' to 'New Women' fundamentally reshapes the dynamics of sympathy: Moore complicates questions of agency, morality and choice, while Hardy challenges the reader to engage with one of the period's most challenging fictional characters, Sue Bridehead.
Dissertation
Sympathy in transformation : dynamics between rhetorics, poetics and ethics
\"There is little doubt that sympathy plays a pivotal role in aesthetic as well as moral experience, yet also little agreement on how to describe this connection and its long history. This volume investigates the changes in the concept of sympathy as well as its rhetorical, poetical and ethical functions from antiquity to the threshold of Romanticism. The focus is on sympathy's development from a cosmological principle expressing the coherence, correspondence, and unity of all things into a theoretical key concept of intersubjectivity informing moral philosophy, criticism and literature. Thus, Sympathy in Transformation offers important insights into the many ways in which, when sympathy migrates into diverse discourses in Early Modernity, its ancient origins dwindle out of sight, while some of its central elements re-emerge in a surprising manner.\"--Back cover.
Book
Sympathy Unbound : Dissonance and Attachment in John Webber's Atlas
In 1784 a print set was produced as a separate volume to accompany the publication of the official account of Captain James Cook’s third expedition, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784). The engravings in this atlas were drawn from the works of John Webber (1751–93), the expedition’s artist. The thesis seeks to connect Webber’s atlas to contemporary debates around sympathy. In the 1780s, the word sympathy was at its most semantically expansive, associated, among other things with fellow feeling, contagion, transfusion, infiltration and extraction, the great chain of being, sexual attraction, electro-magnetism, autonomic reflexes and the principle of caprice. Sympathetic attachments were both desired and precarious for Cook and his crew. When set against their embodied experiences, in terms of their exposure to new ways of understanding the world, and in the harsh physical conditions of life at sea that would have put enormous pressure on their sensory perception of the world, the instability of the concept of sympathy during this period helpfully frames in theory the epistemological and ontological doubts that would have assailed the crew, and which Webber’s images both expose and attempt to resolve. Situating these images alongside a range of visual material, both European and from around the Pacific region, the thesis centres on four main themes—the significance of sympathy in late eighteenth-century moral philosophy; sympathy and cross-cultural material exchange, notably as viewed through the figure of the feather; sympathy and the transparency of self, how the art of the encounter renders the self opaque through technologies of dazzlement; and, finally, the last chapter imagines sympathy in relation to the screen, standing at once as a means of mapping ourselves into the world, as a sort of map itself, and as the risk we run of having other worlds mapped onto us.
Dissertation
Forms of fellow feeling : empathy, sympathy, concern and moral agency
\"What is the basis of our capacity to act morally? This is a question that has been discussed for millennia, with philosophical debate typically distinguishing two sources of morality: reason and sentiment. This collection aims to shed light on whether the human capacity to feel for others really is central for morality and, if so, in what way. To tackle these questions, the authors discuss how fellow feeling is to be understood: its structure, content and empirical conditions. Also discussed are the exact roles that relevant psychological features - specifically: empathy, sympathy and concern - may play within morality. The collection is unique in bringing together the key participants in the various discussions of the relation of fellow feeling to moral norms, moral concepts and moral agency. By integrating conceptually sophisticated and empirically informed perspectives, Forms of Fellow Feeling will appeal to readers from philosophy, psychology, sociology and cultural studies\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain
Why has the West for so long and in so many different ways expressed the idea that the Chinese have a special relationship to cruelty and to physical pain? What can the history of that idea and its expressions teach us about the politics of the West's contemporary relation to China? And what does it tell us about the philosophy of modernity? The Hypothetical Mandarin is, in some sense, a history of the Western imagination. It is also a history of the interactions between Enlightenment philosophy, of globalization, of human rights, and of the idea of the modern. Beginning with Bianchon and Rastignac's discussion of whether the former would, if he could, obtain a European fortune by killing a Chinese mandarin in Balzac's Le Pere Goriot (1835), the book traces a series of literary and historical examples in which Chinese life and European sympathy seem to hang in one another's balance. Hayots wide-ranging discussion draws on accounts of torture, on medical case studies, travelers tales, photographs, plasticized corpses, polemical broadsides, watercolors, and on oil paintings. His analyses show that the historical connection between sympathy and humanity, and indeed between sympathy and reality, has tended to refract with a remarkable frequency through the lens called \"China,\" and why the story of the West's Chinese pain goes to the heart of the relation between language and the body and the social experience of the modern human being. Written in an ebullient prose, The Hypothetical Mandarin demonstrates how the network that intertwines China, sympathy, and modernity continues to shape the economic and human experience.
eBook
