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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.
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.
Anger is an emotion that affects everyone regardless of culture,
class, race, or gender—but at the same time, being angry always
results from the circumstances in which people find themselves. In
On Anger, Sue J. Kim opens a stimulating dialogue between cognitive
studies and cultural studies to argue that anger is always socially
and historically constructed and complexly ideological, and that
the predominant individualistic conceptions of anger are
insufficient to explain its collective, structural, and historical
nature. On Anger examines the dynamics of racial anger in global
late capitalism, bringing into conversation work on political anger
in ethnic, postcolonial, and cultural studies with recent studies
on emotion in cognitive studies. Kim uses a variety of literary and
media texts to show how narratives serve as a means of reflecting
on experiences of anger and also how we think about anger—its
triggers, its deeper causes, its wrongness or rightness. The
narratives she studies include the film Crash, Maxine Hong
Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous
Conditions and The Book of Not, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Devil on
the Cross and Wizard of the Crow, and the HBO series The Wire. Kim
concludes by distinguishing frustration and outrage from anger
through a consideration of Stéphane Hessel’s call to arms,
Indignez-vous! One of the few works that focuses on both anger and
race, On Anger demonstrates that race—including whiteness—is
central to our conceptions and experiences of anger.
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