Journal ArticleDOI
Sympathy time: adam smith, george eliot, and the realist novel
TLDR
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 celebratedread more
Citations
More filters
Dissertation
Nouveaux réalismes et imaginaires sociaux de la modernité dans le roman espagnol contemporain (2001-2011)
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.
Journal ArticleDOI
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Protagonist
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.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Paradox of Narrative Empathy and the Form of the Novel, or What George Eliot Knew
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.
Centers of Consciousness: Protagonism and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
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.
Book
Modernist Empathy: Geography, Elegy, and the Uncanny
TL;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.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
The Scottish invention of English literature
TL;DR: The influence of Scottish rhetoric on the formation of English studies in nineteenth-century English universities was discussed in this article. But it was not discussed in this paper, as it is in this article.
Book
The age of the passions : an interpretation of Adam Smith and Scottish enlightenment culture
TL;DR: Dwyer as discussed by the authors argues that the 18th century, so long regarded as the age of reason, should also be considered the Age of passions, and explores the language of the passions in its specifically Scottish context, suggesting that Scottish writers such as Allan Ramsay, James Fordyce and James MacPherson were cultural pioneers whose significance goes far beyond the transitory popularity of their literary output.
Book
Adventures in Realism
TL;DR: Adventures in Realism as mentioned in this paper is a collection of essays written by a group of contributors, including Slavoj Zizek and Frederic Jameson, focusing on literature and literary theory.
Journal ArticleDOI
Omniscience in Narrative Construction: Old Challenges and New
TL;DR: The authors review the various old-new critical thrusts against epistemic superprivilege (outright denials, partisan judgments, attempted confinements, impairments, replacements, as well as genuine misunderstandings) arising since my constructive theory of omniscience appeared, often in response to it.