Emergence of Empathy: Encountering The Other Through Fiction Saturday, November 16, 2019 at 2:30pm Past Event Watch the video » Like sympathy, empathy derives from the Greek root pathos meaning “to endure or to undergo.” It was coined in 1909 by a psychologist at Cornell University, Edward Bradford Titchner, who suggested the term as a translation of the German Einfühlung. According to Titchner, this emotional impulse to “feel into” something or someone is a strategy we employ to find in external examples solutions for our mental conflicts. Empathy, Titchner suggests, heals the self. Our readings of fiction, the ones that form our imaginary cartographies, define almost every one of our intimate experiences. Love, death, friendship, loss, gratitude, bewilderment, anguish and fear: all these and our own changing identities can be learned from conduct of the imaginary characters we meet in the books we love. Participants: Percival Everett Distinguished Professor of English, University of Southern California Author Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and an author of some thirty books, mostly novels. In his career he has won numerous awards, honors, and fellowships, among the most recent being the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association in 2018. As he puts it, “if… read more » Siri Hustvedt Author, Essayist Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, Reading to You; seven novels, The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved, The Sorrows of an American, The Summer Without Men, The Blazing World, and Memories of the Future, as well as five essay collections, Women, Mothers, Fathers, and Others; A Plea… read more » Yiyun Li Author Professor of Creative Writing, Princeton University Yiyun Li is the author of six books, including two story collections, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, three novels, The Vagrants, Kinder Than Solitude, Where Reasons End, and an essay collection, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Li was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2010, and was chosen by The… read more » Joseph Luzzi Professor of Comparative Literature, Bard College Author Joseph Luzzi (PhD Yale) is Professor of Comparative Literature at Bard College and the author of Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (Yale University Press, 2008), which received the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies; A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), a finalist for the… read more » Alberto Manguel Writer and translator Alberto Manguel is an Argentinian-Canadian writer, translator and critic. He has published both fiction and non-fiction, and received numerous international awards, among others the Formentor Prize 2017 and the Gutenberg Prize 2018. Until August 2018, he was the director of the Argentine National Library. He lives in New York.
Percival Everett Distinguished Professor of English, University of Southern California Author Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and an author of some thirty books, mostly novels. In his career he has won numerous awards, honors, and fellowships, among the most recent being the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association in 2018. As he puts it, “if… read more »
Siri Hustvedt Author, Essayist Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, Reading to You; seven novels, The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved, The Sorrows of an American, The Summer Without Men, The Blazing World, and Memories of the Future, as well as five essay collections, Women, Mothers, Fathers, and Others; A Plea… read more »
Yiyun Li Author Professor of Creative Writing, Princeton University Yiyun Li is the author of six books, including two story collections, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, three novels, The Vagrants, Kinder Than Solitude, Where Reasons End, and an essay collection, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Li was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2010, and was chosen by The… read more »
Joseph Luzzi Professor of Comparative Literature, Bard College Author Joseph Luzzi (PhD Yale) is Professor of Comparative Literature at Bard College and the author of Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (Yale University Press, 2008), which received the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies; A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), a finalist for the… read more »
Alberto Manguel Writer and translator Alberto Manguel is an Argentinian-Canadian writer, translator and critic. He has published both fiction and non-fiction, and received numerous international awards, among others the Formentor Prize 2017 and the Gutenberg Prize 2018. Until August 2018, he was the director of the Argentine National Library. He lives in New York.
Although it would, obviously, be essential to read the actual studies, this article underscores that empathy is indeed in the wind, a current hot topic. https://www.wired.com/story/empathy-is-tearing-us-apart/ Reply