Modernist Empathy

Shows how reading modernist literature gives us fresh insights into tensions within the empathetic imagination and empathy itself.

This book shows how reading modernist literature gives us a fresh and necessary insight into both the tensions within the empathetic imagination and the idea of empathy itself. Writers such as Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, Mary Borden, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf encourage us to enter other perspectives even as they question the boundaries between self and other and, hence, the very possibility of empathy. Eve Sorum maintains that we must think through this complex literary heritage, focusing on the geographic and elegiac modes of the empathetic imagination, and revealing empathy as more fraught, threatening, and even uncanny than it first appears. Modernist Empathy thereby forges a theory of literary empathy as an act not of orientation, but of disorientation, thereby enriching our contemporary understanding of both modernist literature and the concept of literary empathy.

Shows how fin de siècleconceptions of empathy are woven into the fabric of literary modernism Empathy is a cognitive and affective structure of feeling, a bridge across interpersonal distance. Coined in 1909 to combine English 'sympathy' and German 'Einfühlung,' 'empathy' is a specifically twentieth-century concept of fellow feeling. Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism looks into the little-known history of empathy, revealing how this multi-faceted concept had a profound effect on literary modernism. Meghan Marie Hammond shows how five exemplary writers (Henry James, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf) tackle the so-called 'problem of other minds' in ways that reflect and enrich early twentieth-century discourses of fellow feeling. Hammond argues that these authors reconfigure notions of intersubjective experience; their writings mark a key shift away from sympathetic forms of literary representation toward empathic forms that strive to provide an immediate sense of another's thoughts and feelings. But while literary modernism values empathic experience as an ideal, it is also teeming with voices that recognize potential for danger, even violence, in acts of empathy. These voices illuminate our culture's ongoing concern with empathy's limits. Key Features: Recovers early psychology, a discipline that has often been neglected in favor of psychoanalysis, as a framework for literary modernism Provides a conceptual history of empathy that expands our understanding of the modernist world Grants new insight into modernist technique by explaining how it relates to contemporaneous psychological and aesthetic theories on empathy Prompts a rethinking of empathy, a capacity that is as widely misunderstood as it is celebrated

Over the last few decades and from across a spectrum of centrist political thought, a variety of academic disciplines, and numerous public intellectuals, the claim has been that we need to empathize more with marginalized people as a way to alleviate social inequalities. If we all had more skill with empathy, so the claim goes, we would all be better citizens. But what does it mean to empathize with others? How do we develop this skill? And what does it offer that older models of solidarity don't? Why empathy-and why now? Rereading Empathy takes up these questions, examining the uses to which calls for empathy are put in the face of ever expanding economic and social precarity. The contributors draw on a variety of historical and contemporary literary and cultural archives to illustrate the work that empathy is supposed to enable-and to query alternative models of building collective futures.

Does empathy felt while reading fiction actually cultivate a sense of connection, leading to altruistic actions on behalf of real others? Empathy and the Novel presents a comprehensive account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Drawing on psychology, narrative theory, neuroscience, literary history, philosophy, and recent scholarship in discourse processing, Keen 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, yet its role in shaping the behavior of emotional readers has been debated for three centuries. Keen surveys these debates and illustrates the techniques that invite empathetic response. She argues that the perception of fictiveness increases the likelihood of readers' empathy in part by releasing them from the guarded responses necessitated by the demands of real others. Narrative empathy is a strategy and subject of contemporary novelists from around the world, writers who tacitly endorse the potential universality of human emotions when they call upon their readers' empathy. If narrative empathy is to be taken seriously, Keen suggests, then women's reading and responses to popular fiction occupy a central position in literary inquiry, and cognitive literary studies should extend its range beyond canonical novels. In short, Keen's study extends the playing field for literature practitioners, causing it to resemble more closely that wide open landscape inhabited by readers.

Rives uncovers a context of aesthetic and social debate that modernist studies has yet to fully articulate, examining what it meant, for various intellectuals working in early twentieth-century Britain and America, to escape from personality.

Take a big-picture look at teaching and learning. Building on existing pedagogical research, this volume showcases the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) across the disciplines--and takes it in a new direction. In each chapter, interdisciplinary teams of authors address a single pedagogical question, bringing each of their home disciplines specific literature and methodologies to the table. The result is a fresh examination of evidence-based practices for teaching and learning in higher education that is intentionally inclusive of faculty from different disciplines. By taking a closer, more systematic look at the pedagogies used within the disciplines and their impacts on student learning, the authors herein move away from more generic teaching tips and generic classroom activities and toward values, knowledge, and manner of thinking within SoTL itself. The projects discussed in each chapter, furthermore, will provide models for further research via interdisciplinary collaboration. This is the 151st volume of this Jossey-Bass higher education series. It offers a comprehensive range of ideas and techniques for improving college teaching based on the experience of seasoned instructors and the latest findings of educational and psychological researchers.

The book offers the first comprehensive study of Paul Muldoon’s mourning verse. Considering not only the celebrated elegies like "Yarrow," "Incantata" or "Sillyhow Stride" but also the elegiac impulse as it develops throughout Muldoon’s entire work, All Will Be Swept Away charts a large swathe of Muldoon’s poetic landscape in order to show the complexity with which he approaches the themes of death and mourning. Using archival material as well as a vast array of theoretical apparatuses, the book unveils the psychological, literary and political undertones in his poetry, all the while attending to the operations of the poetic text: its form, its music and its capacity to console, warn and censure.