Cultures of Empathy
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday, March 11, 2010 | 3:30PM - 5:00PM | Seminar Room 208N, Munk Centre For International Studies 1 Devonshire Place |
Description
The talk offers a humanities response to recent work on empathy within the cognitive sciences. Most of these theories assume that the primary scene of empathy involves two people: One who has empathy with another. My hypothesis, however, is that human empathy derives from a scene of three individuals: One individual who observes a conflict between two others. The talk proposes a two-step process: When one person observes a conflict by two others, he or she is likely to mentally choose a side. Empathy is now possible, partly to justify one’s choice of taking a side. The second step after the side taking consists in narrating the fate of the chosen person.
The talk will 1) develop this model and provide some psychological evidence (Stockholm Syndrome), 2) indicate how this work relates to individual literary texts, (I will allude to a work of nineteenth-century fiction) and 3) complicate the notion of narration. The latter will allow me to hint at my new project on the “excuse” as a core structure of narrative.
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