Rereading Empathy

Over the last few decades and from across a spectrum of centrist political thought, a variety of academic disciplines, and numerous public intellectuals, the claim has been that we need to empathize more with marginalized people as a way to alleviate social inequalities. If we all had more skill with empathy, so the claim goes, we would all be better citizens. But what does it mean to empathize with others? How do we develop this skill? And what does it offer that older models of solidarity don’t? Why empathy—and why now? Rereading Empathy takes up these questions, examining the uses to which calls for empathy are put in the face of ever expanding economic and social precarity. The contributors draw on a variety of historical and contemporary literary and cultural archives to illustrate the work that empathy is supposed to enable—and to query alternative models of building collective futures.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Why Empathy? Why Now? Emily Johansen (Texas A&M University, USA) and Alissa G. Karl (State University of New York, Brockport, USA) 1. Reading George Eliot in the #metoo Era Susan Bruxvoort Lipscomb (Houghton College, USA) 2. Putting Empathy to Work: Narrative and the Empathetic Entrepreneur Emily Johansen (Texas A&M University, USA) 3. ‘You’ Can’t Feel My Pain: The Limits of Empathy in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric Ralph Clare (Boise State University, USA) 4. Limits to Empathy: On the Motif of Failed Empathy in Julian Barnes Peter Simonsen (University of Southern Denmark, Denmark) and Marie-Elisabeth Lei Holm (University of Southern Denmark, Denmark) 5. Unsettling Empathy: Hassan Blasim, the Iraq War, and the Spectacle of The Corpse Exhibition Terri Tomsky (University of Alberta, Canada) 6. Rachel Cusk’s Empathy Work Alissa G. Karl (State University of New York, Brockport, USA) 7. Affective Possibilities Beyond Empathy Kathryn Cai (Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow with PowerSwitch Action, USA) 8. Affective Misplacement and The Image City Tate Shaw (State University of New York, Brockport, USA) Index

About the Author :
Emily Johansen is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University, USA. She is the author of Cosmopolitanism and Place: Spatial Forms in Contemporary Anglophone Literature (2014) and co-editor, with Alissa G. Karl, of Neoliberalism and the Novel (2016). Alissa G. Karl is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Brockport, USA. She is author of Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Stein, Woolf and Nella Larsen (2009), and co-editor, with Emily Johansen, of Neoliberalism and the Novel (2016).

Review :
Rereading Empathy offers a fascinating and timely engagement with historical and contemporary literary and cultural dynamics and politics of empathy. It addresses a rich array of themes and issues relevant to the logics, possibilities and politics of empathy and, in particular, to the practices and implications of ‘rereading empathy’ today. Rereading Empathy is a smart, astute and scholarly intervention into the emergent field of critical empathy studies. The essays offer a nuanced and sophisticated critical vocabulary and engage in a range of lively and insightful textual readings. The book offers a rich resource for the study of contemporary culture.