Herold, Viktoria Susanne;
(2023)
(Dis)attending to the Other: Contemporary Fictions of Empathy.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This thesis considers how contemporary novels in English, French and German respond to recent discourses on narrative empathy as an antidote to a distracted mind. As the author Leslie Jamison puts it, ‘empathy isn’t just something that happens to us – a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain – it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.’ If figured as a uniquely human way of ‘making a choice’, empathy turns into a strategy used to filter an overwhelming influx of information in a time of ubiquitous connectivity hyperbolically called The Age of Distraction. I argue that empathy’s instrumental appeal lies in the way it mediates the relationship between self and other in alternating movements of attentional contraction and expansion, thereby facilitating acts of care as well as (self-)mastery. By reading novels by Lionel Shriver, Emma Donoghue, Zadie Smith, Katharina Hacker, Patrick Modiano, Teju Cole, Camille Laurens, and Patricia Lockwood alongside theories of empathy taken from the fields of affect theory, cognitive science, media studies, philosophy, psychology, and trauma theory, I aim to explore how contemporary fiction interrogates narrative empathy’s status as an attentional corrective. Through a focus on themes of failed or blocked empathy, as well as the narrative techniques used to manipulate the reader’s flow of attention, I analyse how the texts reflect rather than dispel anxieties surrounding the novel’s ethical value as an ‘attention technology’. It is my contention that the texts do not tame attention, but instead provide examples of literary meta empathy, that is a self-reflexive mode that foregrounds empathy’s relationship to disattendability, distraction and indifference
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | (Dis)attending to the Other: Contemporary Fictions of Empathy |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2022. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > CMII |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10177466 |
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