The Surprising Effects Of Sympathy

Author : David Marshall
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226507101
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Surprising Effects of Sympathy written by David Marshall and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through readings of works by Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley, David Marshall provides a new interpretation of the eighteenth-century preoccupation with theatricality and sympathy. Sympathy is seen not as an instance of sensibility or natural benevolence but rather as an aesthetic and epistemological problem that must be understood in relation to the problem of theatricality. Placing novels in the context of eighteenth-century writing about theater, fiction, and painting, Marshall argues that an unusual variety of authors and texts were concerned with the possibility of entering into someone else's thoughts and feelings. He shows how key eighteenth-century works reflect on the problem of how to move, touch, and secure the sympathy of readers and beholders in the realm of both "art" and "life." Marshall discusses the demands placed upon novels to achieve certain effects, the ambivalence of writers and readers about those effects, and the ways in which these texts can be read as philosophical meditations on the differences and analogies between the experiences of reading a novel, watching a play, beholding a painting, and witnessing the spectacle of someone suffering. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy traces the interaction of sympathy and theater and the artistic and philosophical problems that these terms represent in dialogues about aesthetics, moral philosophy, epistemology, psychology, autobiography, the novel, and society.

Author : Marco Menin
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192679333
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Thinking About Tears written by Marco Menin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-28 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A crucial period for the birth of the modern subject, France's 'long eighteenth century' (approximately 1650-1820) was an era marked by the formulation of a new aesthetic and ethical code revolving around the intensification of emotions and the hyperbolic use of weeping. Precisely because tears are not a simple biological fact but rather hang suspended between natural immediacy, on one side, and cultural artifice, on the other, the analysis of crying came to represent an exemplary testing ground for investigations into the enigmatic relations binding the realm of physiology to that of psychology. Thinking About Tears explores how the link between tears and sensibility in France's long eighteenth century helps shed light on the process through which the European emotional lexicon has been built: from viewing tears as governed by the sphere of 'passions' and 'feelings', thinkers began to view crying as first a matter of sensibility and then of sensiblerie (a pathological excess of sensibility), thereby presupposing an intimate connection with the category of 'sentiments'. For this reason, this volume examines not only or even primarily the actual emotion of crying, but also the attempt to think about and explain this feeling. Drawing on a wide range of early modern philosophical, medical, religious, and literary texts-including moral treatises on the passions, medical textbooks, letters, life-writings, novels, and stage-plays-Thinking About Tears reveals another side to a period that has too often been saddled with the cursory label of 'the age of reason'.

Author : Sotirios Paraschas
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351191853
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination written by Sotirios Paraschas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The nineteenth century realist author was a contradictory figure. He was the focus of literary criticism, but obscured his creative role by insisting on presenting his works as 'copies' of reality. He was a celebrity who found himself subservient to publishers and the public, in a newly-industrialised literary marketplace. He was the owner of his work who was divested of his property by imperfect copyright laws, playwrights who adapted his novels for the stage, and sequel-writers. This combination of a conspicuous yet precarious status with a self-effacing attitude was expressed by an image of the author as a plural, Protean subject, possessing the faculty of sympathetic imagination - which the realists incorporated in their works in the form of a series of fictional characters who functioned as 'doubles' of the author. Paraschas focuses on two realists, Honorede Balzac and George Eliot, and traces this authorial scenario from its origins in the late eighteenth century to its demise in the early twentieth century, examining its presence in the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Friedrich Schlegel, Charles Baudelaire and Andre Gide."

Author : Meghan Marie Hammond
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317817362
Total Pages : 285 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rethinking Empathy through Literature written by Meghan Marie Hammond and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, a growing field of empathy studies has started to emerge from several academic disciplines, including neuroscience, social psychology, and philosophy. Because literature plays a central role in discussions of empathy across disciplines, reconsidering how literature relates to "feeling with" others is key to rethinking empathy conceptually. This collection challenges common understandings of empathy, asking readers to question what it is, how it works, and who is capable of performing it. The authors reveal the exciting research on empathy that is currently emerging from literary studies while also making productive connections to other areas of study such as psychology and neurobiology. While literature has been central to discussions of empathy in divergent disciplines, the ways in which literature is often thought to relate to empathy can be simplistic and/or problematic. The basic yet popular postulation that reading literature necessarily produces empathy and pro-social moral behavior greatly underestimates the complexity of reading, literature, empathy, morality, and society. Even if empathy were a simple neurological process, we would still have to differentiate the many possible kinds of empathy in relation to different forms of art. All the complexities of literary and cultural studies have still to be brought to bear to truly understand the dynamics of literature and empathy.

Author : Suzanne Keen
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780195343601
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Empathy and the Novel written by Suzanne Keen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-19 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does empathy felt while reading fiction actually cultivate a sense of connection, leading to altruistic actions on behalf of real others? Empathy and the Novel presents a comprehensive account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Drawing on psychology, narrative theory, neuroscience, literary history, philosophy, and recent scholarship in discourse processing, Keen brings together resources and challenges for the literary study of empathy and the psychological study of fiction reading. Empathy robustly enters into affective responses to fiction, yet its role in shaping the behavior of emotional readers has been debated for three centuries. Keen surveys these debates and illustrates the techniques that invite empathetic response. She argues that the perception of fictiveness increases the likelihood of readers' empathy in part by releasing them from the guarded responses necessitated by the demands of real others. Narrative empathy is a strategy and subject of contemporary novelists from around the world, writers who tacitly endorse the potential universality of human emotions when they call upon their readers' empathy. If narrative empathy is to be taken seriously, Keen suggests, then women's reading and responses to popular fiction occupy a central position in literary inquiry, and cognitive literary studies should extend its range beyond canonical novels. In short, Keen's study extends the playing field for literature practitioners, causing it to resemble more closely that wide open landscape inhabited by readers.

Author : Jean I. Marsden
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108476139
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Theatres of Feeling written by Jean I. Marsden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging account of theatregoing in the later eighteenth century that explores how audiences responded emotionally to the performances.

Author : Harold Bloom
Publisher : Infobase Learning
ISBN 13 : 1438139993
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mary Shelley's Frankenstein written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Learning. This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Perhaps best recognized for the horror films it has spawned, 'Frankenstein,' written by 19-year-old Mary Shelley, was first published in 1818. 'Frankenstein' warns against the irresponsible use of science and technology and makes readers reconsider who the world's monsters really are and how society contributes to creating them. Ideal for research or general interest, this resource furnishes students with a collection of the most insightful critical essays available on this Gothic thriller, selected from a variety of literary sources."--

Author : Michael Szalay
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822325628
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book New Deal Modernism written by Michael Szalay and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000-12-29 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVArgues that the writers of the 30s and 40s--Hemingway, Ayn Rand, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, Wallace Stevens et al. -- identified and understood the formal problems of literary modernism through an idea of the social and an idiom of s/div

Author : Emily Shortslef
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192694774
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Drama of Complaint written by Emily Shortslef and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-12 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Drama of Complaint: Ethical Provocations in Shakespeare's Tragedy is the first book-length study of complaint in Shakespearean drama. Emily Shortslef makes two main arguments. One is that poetic forms of complaint—expressions of discontent and unhappiness—operate in and across the period's literary and nonliterary discourses as sites of thought about human flourishing, the subject of ethical inquiry. The other is that Shakespearean configurations of these ubiquitous forms in theatrical scenes of complaint model new ways of thinking about ethical subjectivity, or ways of desiring, acting, and living consonant with notions of the good life. The Drama of Complaint develops these interlocking arguments through five chapters that demonstrate the thinking materialized in and through five prolific forms of complaint (existential, judicial, spectral, female, and deathbed). Built around some of the most electrifying scenes in Shakespearean tragedy, each chapter is a case study that identifies and theorizes one of these forms of complaint; delineates a matrix of ethical thought that structures that form; and develops a new reading of a Shakespearean tragedy to which that form of complaint and those ethical questions are integral.

Author : Mary Helen Dupree
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110421062
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Performing Knowledge, 1750-1850 written by Mary Helen Dupree and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-07-31 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period between 1750 and 1850 was a time when knowledge and its modes of transmission were reconsidered and reworked in fundamental ways. Social and political transformations, such as the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, went hand in hand with in new ways of viewing, sensing, and experiencing what was perceived to be a rapidly changing world. This volume brings together a range of essays that explore the performance of knowledge in the period from 1750 to 1850, in the broadest possible sense. The essays explore a wide variety of literary, theatrical, and scientific events staged during this period, including scientific demonstrations, philosophical lectures, theatrical performances, stage design, botany primers, musical publications, staged Schiller memorials, acoustic performances, and literary declamations. These events served as vital conduits for the larger process of generating, differentiating, and circulating knowledge. By unpacking the significance of performance and performativity for the creation and circulation of knowledge in Germany during this period, the volume makes an important contribution to interdisciplinary German cultural studies, performance studies, and the history of knowledge.