Rethinking Empathy through Literature

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.

Meghan Marie Hammond teaches at New York University. She is the author of Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism, forthcoming in the fall of 2014. She has published articles and book chapters on Herman Melville, Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Her next book project is a cultural history of the corpse in the modern era that examines the material relationship between the dead body and narrative.

Sue J. Kim is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She is the author of On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative (2013) and Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race (2009).