According to philosopher Jesse Prinz, more books have been published with the word “empathy” in their titles since 2010 than in all of the 20^th century. Prinz’s metric reveals a cultural fascination with empathy in educational, therapeutic, and scholarly circles—a trend that we might call the “empathetic imperative.” Indeed, empathy is often bandied about as what the world needs more of, as what can solve our woes, and as a purely positive value that might save the crisis-ridden humanities, which supposedly know how to foster it best. As Carolyn Pedwell writes, empathy has become “a Euro-American political obsession.”

Literary studies has also been swept up in the empathy wave with Martha Nussbaum and others arguing for literature’s potential to make readers more empathetic. Yet Suzanne Keen, whose Empathy and the Novel provides a rich formalist analysis of what she calls “narrative empathy,” laments that there is no hard, scientific evidence that reading increases empathy, concluding that readers probably “bring empathy to the novel” and not vice versa (168). Moreover, Paul Bloom’s recent book Against Empathy, shows how empathy is problematic in terms of its exclusivity and negative group dynamics, as well as in its tendency to lead to irrational and harmful decision-making. At the same time, today’s neoliberal world has seen capitalism commodify and create economies of affect, emotion, and empathy that offer only hollow or compromised versions them.

In response to this commodification of empathy in an affective economy, this panel asks: In what ways does contemporary literature respond to liberal humanist discourses of empathy? How might literature imagine or promote a more nuanced or critical kind of empathy than that of a humanist one, thus avoiding a sentimentality that can be manipulated and marketed? And how might this challenge our notions of biologically based empathy and “the human” and the relationship between the individual and the collective? The three scholars on this panel will present their papers for fifteen to eighteen minutes each, leaving ample time for what is sure to be a vibrant and vital discussion.

To begin, Emily Johansen’s “Putting Empathy to Work: Narrative and the Entrepreneurial Use of Trauma” will explore the economics of empathy in Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel, A Little Life. Most of the novel’s reviewers commented on two of novel’s most striking elements: the incredible wealth of its four central characters and the brutal and unending trauma experienced by Jude, the novel’s protagonist. While reviewers vary on the degree to which they find these elements realistic, exploitative, or fantastical, there is an overwhelming consistency in proposing the first as recompense for the second: Jude has “earned” his wealth by his past trauma. This narrative is familiar in its suggestion that wealth comes at a cost that not all are willing or able to pay. Jude’s friends and doctors echo this narrative when they entreat him to narrate his trauma so that they can empathize with him, fix him, and, then, move past it into an idyllic (read: wealthy) future. Constructing narratives that generate empathy, then, is a key stage in the entrepreneurial commodification of one’s past trauma. Yet pointing to the novel’s staggered revelations of the sublime scale of Jude’s trauma and his insistent dismissal of his exceptionalism, Johansen argues that the desire for narrativized empathy to be a productive and entrepreneurial force is shown again and again to be impossible—but, even more than that, a desire that works to further oppress people in the name of salvation and neoliberal triumph.

Alissa Karl’s paper, “Rachel Cusk’s Empathy Work,” similarly looks at the economics of empathy, specifically by examining Rachel Cusk’s recent Outline trilogy (2014-18). Karl traces the ways in which empathy as a capacity is associated with the demands and priorities of contemporary labor markets and gendered practices. Cusk’s novels use the very genre that has been associated with the cultivation of empathy and moral education over the past two or more centuries to posit empathy as a distinct kind of work. Karl thus interrogates Cusk’s construction of a narrative that is organized around the female narrator’s act of listening to others, such that the stories of others comprise the entirety of each novel, and such that the woman novelist narrator is largely effaced from the narrative itself. Karl argues that the Outline trilogy documents empathy as work—a work of the novel, and the work of women, under current regimes of caring, service, and creative labor. Tellingly, in Cusk’s novels, such empathy work precludes the narration of the narrator herself, thus debunking claims to empathy’s purportedly “humanizing” functions.

Lastly, Danielle Haque’s paper, "Against Humanization: Recuperating Empathy through Literatures of Migration," seeks to recuperate a form of empathy outside of market dictates by engaging with the arguments of Martha Nussbaum and Elain Scarry regarding the role of literature in animating readerly empathy and its effectiveness as a catalyst for social change. Haque contends that empathy is not antithetical to rationality, but can be a form of rationality. Certain literary works, through empathetic modes, not only conjure up sentiment, but enable readers to imagine alternative ways of organizing ourselves in communities through rational reflection upon and enactment of these sentiments. She analyzes how China Mieville’s The City and the City and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West employ empathy in decidedly unsentimental, unsettling stories to make the argument for open borders outside the generic framework of humanizing narratives, such as the realist migration narrative or the bildungsroman. Both novels move the border—Exit West dismantles national borders and creates openings in national interiors instead of peripheries, and The City and the City reveals the imaginary nature of borders by having characters self-enforce them in their daily movements. While the novels establish the physical violence inherent in safeguarding borders, they also expose how borders are normalized and desired through affective modes. If maintaining borders depends upon synchronized acts of imagining and feeling, then opening them, these works suggest, takes collective and political acts of imagination and empathy.