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"Sympathy Fiction."
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Empathy and the Novel
This book presents an account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Though readers' and authors' empathy certainly contribute to the emotional resonance of fiction and its success in the marketplace, this book finds the case for altruistic consequences of novel reading inconclusive. It offers instead a detailed theory of narrative empathy, with proposals about its deployment by novelists and its results in readers. The book engages with neuroscience and contemporary psychological research on empathy, bringing affect to the center of cognitive literary studies' scrutiny of narrative fiction. Drawing on narrative theory, literary history, philosophy, and contemporary scholarship in discourse processing, the book brings together resources and challenges for the literary study of empathy and the psychological study of fiction reading. Empathy robustly enters into affective responses to fiction, but its proper role in shaping the behavior of emotional readers has been debated for three centuries. The book surveys these debates and offers a series of hypotheses about literary empathy, including narrative techniques inviting empathetic response. It argues that above all readers' perception of a text's fictiveness increases the likelihood of readers' empathy, by releasing readers from their guarded responses to the demands of real others. The book confirms the centrality of narrative empathy as a strategy, as well as a subject, of contemporary novelists. Despite the disrepute of putative human universals, novelists from around the world endorse the notion of shared human emotions when they overtly call upon their readers' empathy. Consequently, the book suggests, if narrative empathy is to be better understood, women's reading and popular fiction must be accorded the respect of experimental inquiry.
eBook
Great joy
Just before Christmas, when Frances sees a sad-eyed organ grinder and his monkey performing near her apartment, she can't stop thinking about them, wondering where they go at night, and wishing she could do something to help.
Book
Exploring the Nonhuman Other: A Study of Posthuman Care in Isaac Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me
With the rise of critical posthumanism, the concept of human comes under scrutiny. Human borders are increasingly thought to be permeable, with the concept of becoming-with being highly valued. With the growing perception that human history is intertwined and that humans have always been a dependent organism, the idea of human as an autonomous entity with agency and control over other beings—both living and nonliving—is highly questionable. The emotions and sufferings of nonhumans are regarded in a new light as the factor of transcorporeality is carefully investigated. In the current advanced science and technological scenario, this is well portrayed in certain science fiction works, where the machines shaped and created by humans in turn shape the humans themselves. Given this context, this article primarily analyses the care and trauma of the nonhumans (highly intelligent machines/robots) presented in Isaac Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me. Secondarily, the article looks at the moral conundrum of upholding a policy of care and compassion for nonhumans (machines), which marks a novel development and further scope of inquiry. Finally, the article calls for the necessity to investigate nonhuman care and emotions, demonstrating that the binary between humans and nonhumans is indeed bleak as the borders between the two variables are not strong enough to prevent coevolution, which thereby views humans as a dependent species, an assemblage of various nonhuman constituent elements.
Journal Article
Matt Ottley: Illustrator–Australlia
\"If my books can have furthered, in their small way, the cause of compassion and empathy, then it will all have been worthwhile.\"
Journal Article
Sympathy and the Self in William Godwin’s Mandeville (1817)
In his Gothic novel Mandeville (1817), the radical political philosopher and author William Godwin presents a complex and compassionate depiction of the imaginative formation of individual selfhood and the way in which the limits of sympathy and the nature of selfhood operate to violently separate the individual from social sympathy. Godwin employs the coercive language of property and wounds to describe his eponymous protagonist’s experience and imaginative conceptualization of sympathy as a violent loss of selfhood; Charles Mandeville thus desires and fears social sympathy, imagining it as a threat against the privacy and integrity of his selfhood. The extreme nature of Mandeville’s desire for and aversion to sympathy demonstrates Godwin’s increasing reluctance to reconcile his interest in a radically private and imaginative selfhood with his theory that the imagination can and should in some way be controlled, expansive, empathetic, and social—in other words, transformed into a sympathetic and socially useful imagination, as described by theorists like Adam Smith and Joanna Baillie. Mandeville further reveals Godwin’s frustration with more optimistic theories of sympathy, depicting a character touched by political, physical, and psychological traumas, unable to solicit sympathy and never freely given sympathy except by manipulators. In Mandeville, Godwin offers a portrait of the conflicting and fundamentally irreconcilable relationship between the imaginative individual and social sympathy, one that both develops his own view of the complex relationship between the individual and community while deconstructing more utopian Romantic visions of the self and sympathy.
Journal Article
Sympathy for Oswald Mosley: Politics of Reading and Historical Resemblance in the Moral Imagination of an English Literary Society
The mid-twentieth-century English novelist, Henry Williamson, wrote nature stories but also romantic and historical fiction, including a fifteen-volume saga that contains a largely favorable characterization of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. This essay considers the challenge of such a fascist character through the prism of the literary imagination of Williamson readers, and more specifically through my longstanding ethnographic work with an English literary society constituted in the author’s name. I am centrally concerned with how literary society members deal with the positive depiction of the Mosley-based character through the stages of the reading process that they identify and describe. Do the immersive values commonly attached to their solitary reading culture, for instance, assist or further problematize that engagement? What role does their subsequent, shared practice of character evaluation play? As well as considering the treatment of characters as objects of sympathy, I explore the vital sympathies that for literary society members tie characters together with historical persons. Across the essay I dialogue with anthropological literature on exemplars, historical commentaries on the fascist cult of leadership, and finally with the philosophical claims that Nussbaum makes for the moral and political consequences of fiction reading.
Journal Article
A New \Mammy\ in the Age of Digitalization; Human Insecurity Versus Utopian Affective Algorithms in Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and The Sun
Science fiction has advanced beyond the depiction of artificial intelligence, which is capable of conscious thought to speculate on a future in which machines that feel and initiate feeling in return are created. This article discusses Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and The Sun (2021) as a textual reference by considering circumstances in which emotional capacity no longer separates humans from machines. In most dystopian literature, political distinctions between humans and less-than-humans are typically used to describe the systems of governance, with the latter constituting the marginalised yet inexorable substratum that supports and normalises the dominant system. Drawing on Affect Literary Theory and its relevance to AI, I argue that, contrary to popular belief, Klara, the AI, can feel emotions such as sadness, grief, sympathy, love, faith, and hope. Nonetheless, rather than being pleased and comfortable, humans represented in Klara and the Sun contest AI's supremacy and use otherness as a defence mechanism to degrade AIs to feel superior and defend themselves from AI's likely rule of the planet. In Klara and the Sun, a disturbing historical parallel to the position of the AIs in the social hierarchy is that of slaves since, like slaves, their existence is reduced to their disposable utility. I can conclude that slavery expands to encompass the entire planet, with androids, genetically modified humans, and the earth itself functioning as sites of human capitalist exploitation. Using Affect Theory, I argue that Ishiguro attempts to elicit humans' sympathy and empathy with Klara, the AI, in order to advocate for a relationship in which humans have never been distinct from machines and conceptions of humanness could not be formulated without technologies.
Journal Article
Failures of Feeling
This book recovers the curious history of the \"insensible\" in the Age of Sensibility. Tracking this figure through the English novel's uneven and messy past, Wendy Anne Lee draws on Enlightenment theories of the passions to place philosophy back into conversation with narrative. Contemporary critical theory often simplifies or disregards earlier accounts of emotions, while eighteenth-century studies has focused on cultural histories of sympathy. In launching a more philosophical inquiry about what emotions are, Failures of Feeling corrects for both of these oversights. Proposing a fresh take on emotions in the history of the novel, its chapters open up literary history's most provocative cases of unfeeling, from the iconic scrivener who would prefer not to and the reviled stock figure of the prude, to the heroic rape survivor, the burnt-out man-of-feeling, and the hard-hearted Jane Austen herself. These pivotal cases of insensibility illustrate a new theory of mind and of the novel predicated on an essential paradox: the very phenomenon that would appear to halt feeling and plot actually compels them. Contrary to the assumption that fictional investment relies on a richness of interior life, Lee shows instead that nothing incites the passions like dispassion.
eBook
Compassion as Commodity
While it was common for Victorian working-class women to be employed outside of the home, a paid occupation spelled the end of gentility for their bourgeois counterparts. Yet many of these ladies found respectable alternatives to make a living. For our research of the nineteenth century, we rely to a great extent on numbers – census data, population statistics, percentages. However, few contemporary employment records give an accurate or reliable account of the respective household constellation, particularly with regard to women. Looking at these numbers, we have to bear in mind that we are also looking at numbers accrued with certain assumptions about the role of women in society. Unlike the New Woman of the fin de siècle, who is a typist or clerk, some held positions which fell outside of the common labor categories. From Charles Dickens to Neo-Edwardian literature, these ‘odd women’ appear as caretakers, companions, and assistants performing various duties. Broadening the scope of investigation into women and work in England during the long nineteenth century beyond considerations of manual and educational employment into the realm of emotional labor, we can obtain more information on the restrictions of contemporary ideology and the power dynamics of affective care.
Journal Article