Empathy's neglected cousin
how narratives shape our sympathy
pp. 451-480
in: Thomas Blake (ed), The Palgrave handbook of affect studies and textual criticism, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstrakt
In this essay, I argue that a reexamination of sympathy in fiction is important, not only as a counterpart to its more fashionable cousin, empathy, but also as a literary and social phenomenon in its own right. In making this case, I first clarify my own understanding of empathy and sympathy as they operate in our daily lives, then consider some of the ethical concerns raised by both phenomena, before turning to their roles in fiction. Following Suzanne Keen's coinage of the term narrative empathy, I employ the term narrative sympathy to describe the constellation of processes and effects implied by the convergence of a narrative's features and our responses to them, which result in our sympathy for fictional characters. In particular, I explore how the judgmental nature of sympathy lends itself to the development of narrative sympathy. Such sympathy is shaped and amplified by the judgmental processes, analyzed by James Phelan and Meir Sternberg, that texts naturally activate in readers.
