While empathy continues to be a buzzword in literary studies (for the year 2018 alone, a WorldCat cross-search of “empathy” and “literature” brings up thirty-two new books), there is little consensus among practitioners of literature regarding what the term implies, whether or not we need more of it, and what effect reading different kinds of fiction may have on developing one’s capacity for empathy. So, on the one hand, websites such as “Empathy Lab: Read for Empathy Guide” (http://www.empathylab.uk/empathybookcollection) treat empathy as an unalloyed public good and, moreover, something that can be cultivated by reading certain kinds of stories. On the other hand, the “bad empathy” camp is going strong, represented by such studies as Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (2016)—which inspired a thought-provoking panel at MLA 2018, featuring Bloom, himself, in conversation with Joshua Landy and Patrick Colm Hogan—and Fritz Breithaupt’s bestselling Die dunklen Seiten der Empathie (2017; forthcoming in English in 2019). The proposed special session focuses on the controversial cultural status of empathy, specifically in the context of the profession of literary studies, aiming to articulate the theoretical, ideological, and disciplinary stakes of making—or refusing to make—empathy an integral part of literary-critical discourse.

The four presenters recruited for this special session may be said to represent different varieties of skepticism toward claims about literature and empathy. While “refusing to jump on Paul Bloom’s anti-empathy bandwagon,” disabilities studies scholar Ralph James Savarese proposes to differentiate between cognitive and emotional (or reactive) empathy and “appraise the virtues and vices of each.” Drawing on neurocognitive research into Mirror-Touch Synesthesia and autism (both of which significantly increase emotional but not typical cognitive empathy) and using as his case study Melville’s Moby-Dick, Savarese shows how the awareness of the difference between these two kinds of empathy may impact the field of disabilities studies and the profession at large. The second speaker, Suzanne Keen, author of a groundbreaking inquiry into claims that character identification fosters narrative empathy, Empathy and the Novel (2007), considers the phenomenon of “empathic inaccuracy”—that is, readers’ errant or idiosyncratic emotional reaction to fiction—as opposed to “empathic accuracy,” that is their acceptance of the narrator’s reports about characters’ mental representations, bodily sensations, and fleeting thoughts and feelings (a reaction which could be regarded as a default setting in fiction). Keen then uses empathic inaccuracy as a starting point for a conversation about the disjunction between interpretative and pedagogical practices. Literary education, she points out, often masks a tacit prescriptivism under its cultivation of critical tact, but, paradoxically, the same teachers who guide students to interpretations that stay within acceptable bounds also celebrate resistant, cross-grain, and revisionist readings advanced by literary professionals. Taking it as a given that empathic inaccuracy exists among both ordinary and trained readers, Keen relates it to what feminist narratologist Susan Lanser describes as negative plotting, in which “particular events or full stories take on (primary or enhanced) meaning in relation to their textually triggered, though not necessarily textually inscribed, antitheses” (2009). She then considers ramifications, for teachers of literature, of taking seriously the evidence of divergent, even antithetical, empathetic responses from trained resistant readers and self-taught ordinary readers. The third speaker, Fritz Breithaupt, suggests that, before literary scholars embrace empathy as a moral imperative (as opposed to, for instance, a narrative category), they should be aware of its “dark side.” For, the ability to empathize with others proves to be a prerequisite for deliberate acts of humiliation and cruelty, and even well-meaning compassion can have many unintended consequences. Breithaupt discusses a range of phenomena, including vampirism (helicopter parents wishing to relive a better youth), empathic sadism, humanitarianism (in which people identify with helper-heroes to feel good about themselves at the cost of holding others in the victim role, but mistake this for empathy), and dynamics of polarization (empathetic side-taking that leads to aggression). While he points out that these arguments do not amount to an overall position “against” empathy, they should give pause to those who embrace empathy for moral reasons and see the value of literature as promoting empathy. Finally, coming from the interdisciplinary field of “cognitive approaches to literature,” the fourth speaker, Lisa Zunshine, discusses the frequent conflation, in public and scholarly discourse, of the categories of “empathy” and “theory of mind.” One context in which such a conflation frequently occurs is the discourse about the social function of literature, for instance, the argument that reading literature improves both empathy and theory of mind and thus turns students into better citizens (a line of reasoning which is expected to carry weight with university administrators in charge of allocating scarce resources). While actual studies of the effects of reading fiction on empathy and theory of mind (e.g., Kidd and Castano 2013 and 2017; Panero et al 2016; Mar et al, 2006 and 2018) take care to differentiate between the two, what remains undertheorized is the question of what historically-specific “ideologies of mind” (Schieffelin 2008) may structure our expectations about the salutary effects of fiction reading and thus encourage this conflation.

This special session is conceived as polemical rather than expository, and the speakers will be asked to limit their presentations to twelve minutes each in order to leave plenty of time for discussion.