Rereading Empathy

Description

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. Cover Contents Contributors Introduction: Why Empathy? Why Now? Emily Johansen and Alissa G. Karl 1 Reading George Eliot in the #metoo Era Susan Bruxvoort Lipscomb 2 Putting Empathy to Work: Narrative and the Empathetic Entrepreneur Emily Johansen 3 “You” Can’t Feel My Pain: The Limits of Empathy in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric Ralph Clare 4 Limits to Empathy: On the Motif of Failed Empathy in Julian Barnes Peter Simonsen and Marie-Elisabeth Lei Holm 5 Unsettling Empathy: Hassan Blasim, the Iraq War, and the Spectacle of The Corpse Exhibition Terri Tomsky 6 Rachel Cusk’s Empathy Work Alissa G. Karl 7 Affective Possibilities beyond Empathy Kathryn Cai 8 Affective Misplacement and the Image City Tate Shaw Index