Book contents
- Modernist Empathy
- Modernist Empathy
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustration
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Modernizing Empathy, Locating Loss
- Chapter 2 Disorientation, Elegy, and the Uncanny
- Chapter 3 Disorienting Empathy
- Chapter 4 Elegizing Empathy
- Chapter 5 Uncanny Empathy
- Conclusion Performing Empathy?
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion - Performing Empathy?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 June 2019
- Modernist Empathy
- Modernist Empathy
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustration
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Modernizing Empathy, Locating Loss
- Chapter 2 Disorientation, Elegy, and the Uncanny
- Chapter 3 Disorienting Empathy
- Chapter 4 Elegizing Empathy
- Chapter 5 Uncanny Empathy
- Conclusion Performing Empathy?
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Throughout this book I have argued that we have to recognize how modernist empathy challenges premises about the integrity of the subject and the inviolability of one’s own identity. The issue of empathy feels all the more important today as we are asked to limit our imaginative range and to fear, rather than stand in the shoes of, those who seem other. If there is a darkness at the heart of modernist empathy and a threat of loss that defines and delimits every movement outside the self, how can we use our understanding of the writers and places discussed in this book to inform our own representational projects and efforts at empathy today? I am not looking for a prescription – the ten acts of empathy that will help save a refugee or turn the tide against chauvinistic thinking – but rather for how we might see clearly the dangers and benefits of trying to see through someone else’s eyes and stand in their shoes.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernist EmpathyGeography, Elegy, and the Uncanny, pp. 174 - 185Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019