Sympathy time: adam smith, george eliot, and the realist novel
TL;DR: Omniscient narration, shrinking the distance between ourselves and oth ers, encourages sympathy: the assumption is that by knowing more?of what others know or think along with what they don't, we draw closer and more inclined to sympathize with their conditions.
Abstract: Talk about novel-reading and sympathy and you are likely to spend some of that time talking about omniscience. If your subject is the nineteenth-century realist novel, you will probably have something to say about the relationship between ethi cal feeling and free indirect discourse which suggests that peering into the secret hearts and minds of characters enables our sympathy for them, and thus that "sym pathy" names that special ability to cultivate our identification with others through feeling what they feel and knowing what they know, or what they are thinking about. In this vein omniscient narration, shrinking the distance between ourselves and oth ers, encourages sympathy: the assumption is that by knowing more?of what others know or think along with what they don't?we draw closer and more inclined to sympathize with their conditions. The link between sympathy and knowledge is all but guaranteed in this formulation, as indeed it regularly goes without saying that fa cilitating our sympathetic identification with characters is what many English real ists' experiments in omniscience were designed to do. Sympathy in such novels, so the story goes, results from both seeing and knowing: the unique seeing into and knowledge of interiors afforded by the nineteenth-century novel's most celebrated
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Dissertation•
08 Dec 2017
TL;DR: Chirbes et al. as mentioned in this paper discuss the reappropriation of realism in the production narrative espagnole des annees 2000, a partir d'un corpus of quatre romans, and se demande: en quoi consiste l'esthetique realiste actuelle, quelle est son epistemologie and quel lien entretient-elle avec d'autres discours de savoir.
Abstract: Cette these porte sur le renouvellement du realisme dans la production narrative espagnole des annees 2000, a partir d’un corpus de quatre romans, et se demande : en quoi consiste l’esthetique realiste actuelle, quelle est son epistemologie et quel lien entretient-elle avec d’autres discours de savoir ? Quel role jouent les recits realistes dans la configuration des imaginaires sociaux, alors que sont remis en question l’heritage de la transition democratique et le recit de la modernisation espagnole ? Sont d’abord examinees les conditions de possibilite historiques, socio-economiques et culturelles d’un renouveau du realisme – cartographie dans le champ litteraire des vingt dernieres annees. Hypothese centrale : le realisme ressurgit du fait que les debats de memoire historique depuis 2000 et la crise economique, sociale et politique depuis 2008 engagent une revision du mythe de la Transition et du projet de la modernite qui structurait les imaginaires sociaux espagnols depuis les annees 1960. Trois parties proposent des etudes de poetiques realistes, en diachronie et en synchronie, pour mettre en valeur l’evolution des modes de referentialite realistes entre le debut des annees 2000 et le debut des annees 2010, avec la crise de 2008 et ses premices pour point d’inflexion. La premiere partie porte sur deux romans (Antonio Munoz Molina, Sefarad, 2001 et Ignacio Martinez de Pison, Enterrar a los muertos, 2005) qui dialoguent avec la fabrication sociale de documents et l’historiographie pour reinterpreter la guerre de 1936, de la dictature et de la transition. Les deuxieme et troisieme parties (Rafael Chirbes, Crematorio, 2007, et Isaac Rosa, La mano invisible, 2011) analysent l’elaboration d’un recit collectif de l’Espagne developpementaliste, a l’aube de la crise, par des romans qui dialoguent avec la theorie economique et la sociologie historique. Au carrefour du litteraire, des discours sociaux, de l’histoire et de la sociologie contemporaine de l’Espagne, cette these soutient que la reappropriation du realisme dans les annees 2000 participe a la remise en question d’une identite nationale democratique et moderne, au resurgissement d’une realite problematique et d’imaginaires sociaux paramodernes apres l’ecroulement du metarecit d’une transition modele. Si les romans cherchent tous a prendre en charge le reel social selon ses representations, ils se differencient par leur traitement de la question politique de ce que « reel » veut dire, par le choix du chemin selon lequel le decrire, et par l’evaluation de la nature des causes historiques et materielles de la realite qu’habitent les ecrivains.
65 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the creature's exceptional status is due largely to his prowess as a narrator of other characters' points of view, and that it is only the creature whose sustains an intimate, internally focalized engagement with another character's interiority.
Abstract: While readings of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein often consider the creature's thematic centrality and sympathetic appeal, I argue that the creature's exceptional status is due largely to his prowess as a narrator of other characters' points of view. All three of Frankenstein's first-person narrators present characters' biographies and focalized perspectives in their narrative frames, yet it is only the creature whose sustains an intimate, internally focalized engagement with another character's interiority. Frankenstein's interest in this comparative identification is indicative of a larger approach to characterization that I call protagonism, a term that describes novels' impulse to distribute the kinds of deep interiority and intimate identification we often associate with one or two privileged heroes among many textually and thematically marginalized figures.
23 citations
TL;DR: The idea that the act of reading literature expands our empathy is a popular one as mentioned in this paper, and the benefits of empathy are presumed to be considerable and the lack of it is often deplored, sometimes being associated with psychopathy and criminality.
Abstract: A man falling into dark water seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones; and Silas, by acting as if he believed in false hopes, warded off the moment of despair. --George Eliot, Silas Marner (47) The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/Is the wisdom of humility. --T. S. Eliot, "East Coker" (11.48-49) It is usually assumed that empathy--the ability to imagine oneself into the inner life of another--is a good thing (Prinz 211). Recent research links empathy with ethical consequences such as "altruism and prosocial behavior, moral development, interpersonal bonding, and improved intergroup relations" (Harrison 256). Empathy has become a ubiquitous concept in areas ranging from politics, law, and business ethics to medical care and education, to name just a few (Coplan 3). The benefits of empathy are presumed to be considerable and the lack of it is often deplored, sometimes being associated with psychopathy and criminality (Harrison 256). Several perspectives, including evolutionary ones, are based on the view that empathy is an evolved faculty, vital to humankind's cooperation and hence survival (Moore and Hallenbeck 471). In other words, empathy is thus often considered to be useful, indispensable, and even morally good. (1) The notion that the act of reading literature expands our empathy is a popular one. (2) The idea that reading develops our ability to shift perspectives, and that it enhances our understanding of unknown others, is often heard in academia as well as beyond. Martha Nussbaum believes that the empathy induced by reading literature can have an influence on a person's moral development and even prompt altruistic behavior in the real world, a contention she shares with many other philosophers and with (developmental) psychologists (Keen, "Novel Readers" 21). Recently, the psychologists David Kidd and Emanuele Castano published a conspicuous study in Science, submitting that reading (good) fiction improves empathy. Although the outcomes they reported were far from conclusive, the impact on the public debate was massive and bolstered the case for literature as a tool to improve our moral character. Even so, the idea that empathy, or what is referred to here as narrative empathy--that is, "the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another's situation and condition" (Keen, "Narrative Empathy")--has a civilizing effect on our behaviors and attitudes has been challenged within literary studies. That empathy somehow enters into the fictional experience may be a fairly uncontroversial idea. As Fritz Breithaupt puts it, "there would probably be no fiction if we did not have the ability to imagine how it feels to be another or to be in another's situation" (2); but empathy's role in prosocial behavior and altruism has been greatly debated. Although admitting empathy's essential role in reading, Suzanne Keen is critical of the altruism-empathy hypothesis as it relates to fiction. In her influential book Empathy and the Novel (2007), she questions "the contemporary truism that novel reading cultivates empathy that produces good citizens for the world" (xv). According to Keen, there is very little empirical evidence that suggests a clear causal relationship between novel-reading and altruism. In fact, Keen shows that readers empathize in unforeseen ways (Morgan 32) and that altruistic behavior after reading is quite unusual. (3) The recent anthology Rethinking Empathy through Literature (2014) follows up on some of the questions raised by Keen, addressing the increasing need to problematize the concept of empathy and confront the widespread idea that reading literature generates prosocial behaviour. (4) This discussion sets out to problematize the empathy-altruism hypothesis as it relates to literature--that is, the assumption that literature makes us better people--by examining a paradox engendered by empathy in the novel. …
22 citations
DOI•
01 Jan 2013
TL;DR: Clark et al. as discussed by the authors argue that the readerly experience of identification with characters remains implicitly desirable, risking what Wayne Booth described as an immature experience, while also showing limits a means for Eliot's failures.
Abstract: Centers of Consciousness: Protagonism and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel Anna Elizabeth Clark Since Aristotle, we have categorized characters in terms of relative quantity and proportion. From Henry James’s “center of consciousness,” to E. M. Forster’s theory of “round” and “flat,” to Deirdre Lynch’s “pragmatics of character,” to Alex Woloch’s influential “one and many,” scaled distinctions between “major” and “minor” characters have remained unchallenged since the Poetics. Yet, such classifications don’t speak to the ways characters generate interest and consequence disproportionate to their textual presence. My dissertation counters scaled definitions of character by proposing a form of characterization called protagonism. Here, limited amounts of text yield the kind of capacious subjectivity we normally associate with copious amounts of dialogue or exposition, as formal narrative features such as point of view and interpolation produce richly compact portraits, often of otherwise ancillary figures. Protagonism may lack the “exhaustive presentation” that Ian Watt claims is inherent to the novel, but it is nonetheless rich in the personality and specificity we typically associate with protagonists. Indeed, many canonical novels, especially those of literary realism’s highpoint in nineteenth-century Britain, resist the character hierarchy implied by distinctions such as major and minor. In addition to manifest examples such as Collins’s “experiment” with many narrators in The Woman in White (1859), we can count instances in which novels juxtapose quantitatively significant characters in qualitative terms. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), where the title character’s protagonistic potential is undermined by his creature’s arresting autobiography, to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), in which readerly affections are split between a Jewish hero, an egoistic heroine, and a narrator’s attempt to relate “everything” to “everything else,” novels that are far from generic outliers fit uneasily into scaled models of characterization, even when their titles and critics imply otherwise. Protagonism is how such novels disrupt the impulse for sustained identification with a single exceptional perspective, directing attention towards characters who might otherwise appear nondescript, inscrutable, or threatening. As my project traces protagonism’s adaptable formal applications, it considers a version of figurative individuality based not in self-differentiation, but in what I refer to as social recognition: in contrast to readings of the nineteenth-century novel as a site in which individual and social agon find expression before an ultimate reconciliation or synthesis, protagonism’s brief, concise, and instantaneous markers of richly individualized perspective foreground the perception of subjectivity over its descriptive representation, flattening out tensions between individuality and its inscription within a social body. Narrative techniques such as focalization, free indirect discourse, and autodiegetic narration all serve to produce the kind of reflexive recognition more commonly associated with sight, evoking a precise subjectivity at first “glance.” This version of literary individuality both reflects and complicates the social purpose that Victorian authors such as Dickens and Eliot claim for the novel. As Eliot suggests in “The Natural History of German Life,” literature should “amplif[y] experience and exten[d] our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot,” resisting stock figures and stereotypes to produce a readerly relationship with realist characters that is deliberate, sustained, and self-reflective. This view of the novel’s morally instructive capacity is refracted in recent arguments by scholars such as Martha Nussbaum, who argues that readers’ engagement with the novel’s prolonged form and involved descriptions cultivates their ethical imagination. Yet for both Eliot and latterday critics, the readerly experience of identification with characters remains suspect, if still implicitly desirable, risking what Wayne Booth has described as an “immature” experience of literature divorced from its “aesthetic experience.” Protagonism reveals such dissonances while also showing how characterization itself is a means for the novel to explore individuality’s social obligations. Protagonism models the inclusive social sympathy Eliot seeks; it also demonstrates the limits and failures of such collective ends.
19 citations
Book•
27 Jun 2019TL;DR: The authors show 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, and reveal empathy as more fraught, threatening, and even uncanny than it first appears.
Abstract: 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.
10 citations
References
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Book•
01 Jan 1987
TL;DR: In this paper, the political novel is defined as "the political novel, or - what is to be done?" The ideology of ideology is used to resist the novel, and the ideology of place is used for known unknown locations.
Abstract: Acknowledgements 1. Resisting the novel 2. The ideology of ideology 3. 'Known unknown' locations: the ideology of place 4. Characters, narrators, and readers: making friends with signs 5. Conversation and dialogue 6. Thick plots: history and fiction 7. Conclusion: the political novel, or - what is to be done? Notes Bibliography Index
118 citations
Book•
15 Jan 1992
TL;DR: Litvak as discussed by the authors argues that private experience in the novels of Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Eliot, and James is a rigorous enactment of a public script that constructs normative gender and class identities, and suggests that the theatricality which pervades these novels enforces social norms while introducing opportunities for novelists to resist them.
Abstract: Litvak demonstrates that private experience in the novels of Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Eliot, and James is a rigorous enactment of a public script that constructs normative gender and class identities. He suggests that the theatricality which pervades these novels enforces social norms while introducing opportunities for novelists to resist them. This approach encourages a rethinking of the genre and its cultural contexts in all their instability and ambivalence.
116 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1986
111 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a ligne coherente entre l'opposition sentimentaliste a Hume and la theorie liberale de la justice chez Smith, aboutissant a la formulation originale d'un liberalisme sympathique qui prend en compte le point de vue individuel dans les jugements rendus par la justice.
Abstract: Etude des contributions recentes au probleme Adam Smith qui consiste a reconcilier son ethique sentimentaliste avec son economie egoiste et sa politique libertaire. Examinant les ouvrages de A. Fitzgibbons, C. Griswold et J. Muller, ainsi que la reception du theme rousseauiste et kantien du respect dans la philosophie morale de Smith, l'A. montre que les commentateurs contemporains reperent une ligne coherente entre l'opposition sentimentaliste a Hume et la theorie liberale de la justice chez Smith, aboutissant a la formulation originale d'un liberalisme sympathique qui prend en compte le point de vue individuel dans les jugements rendus par la justice
100 citations