Journal ArticleDOI
Sympathy time: adam smith, george eliot, and the realist novel
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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
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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
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Acts of Narrative
TL;DR: The Place of Narrative CarolJacobs as mentioned in this paper discusses the place of narrative fiction in the history of literature and the role of the critic and the audience in the creation of stories.
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Stupid Sensations: Henry James, Good Form, and Reading Middlemarch Without a Brain
TL;DR: The brain is, after all, an organ, as James himself emphasizes in "Is There Life After Death?" and the form of the novel is not ideal or abstract but, as "The Art of Fiction" tells us, that of "a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism".
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The Narrator as Medium in George Eliot's "The Lifted Veil"
TL;DR: A common critical approach to "The Lifted Veil," George Eliot's tale of a man cursed by powers of telepathy and premonition, is to read it as an allegorical investigation of the workings of fictional narrative itself as discussed by the authors.
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