Geometries of Empathy by Ágota Márton
What does it mean to empathize today? Virginia Woolf was convinced that 'the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved', first and foremost, to 'express character.' But to what extent can the novel capture the 'unlimited capacity and infinite variety' of other minds and lives? By revealing the origins of the term 'empathy' in modernist aesthetics, Ágota Márton offers a radical new perspective on the contemporary novel. Translated into English in 1908 from the German Einfühlung, empathy did not initially mean sharing or understanding the feelings of another human. It described imaginative projection into a work of art or an object. Empathy implied unknowability, un-ownability. Hesitancy and withholding, even self-erasure, become intrinsic to understanding the outer world. This aesthetic phenomenology profoundly informed modernist experiments in the novel. But it is also deeply relevant to post-millennial fiction. Through explicit dialogue with their modernist predecessors, novelists such as Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Rachel Cusk, Amit Chaudhuri, and Ciaran Carson experiment with attentional modes that test the scale and sources, the very possibility, of empathic exchange. In their work, there are no fixed subject positions; transparent access to others is impossible. This volume shows how empathy with others must instead be mediated through geometrical shapes and forms: circles, lines, rectangles, surfaces, symmetries, prisms of attention. Sculpting new modes of detached immersion, these novelists are rethinking what it means to 'make space' for the other.-
Wordsworth and Coleridge
-
The Making of Percy's Reliques
-
Anais Nin, Fictionality and Femininity
-
On Sympathy
-
Royalist Women Writers, 1650-1689
- Refugee Writing, Refugee Reading
-
Reading Veganism
-
Conversation Pieces
-
The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language
-
James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film
-
Poetic Effects in the Prose of Virginia Woolf and Emilio Cecchi
-
Committed Styles
-
Modernist Parody
-
V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought
-
Charles Olson and American Modernism
-
Visionary Philology
-
Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time
-
Memories of a Lost War
-
Defending Poetry
-
Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction
-
Metafiction and the Postwar Novel
-
The nouveau roman and Writing in Britain After Modernism
-
The Platonism of Walter Pater
-
Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders
-
The Art of Hunger
-
Du Bartas' Legacy in England and Scotland
-
Spatial Poetics
-
John Lydgate's Fall of Princes
-
South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain
-
Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart
-
Melodious Tears
-
Shelley and Scripture
-
W.B. Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, Censorship, and the Irish State
-
Coleridge and the Doctors
-
John Donne's Articulations of the Feminine
-
Divine Cartographies
-
Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne
-
Acting Between the Lines
-
H.D. and the Public Sphere of Modernist Women Writers 1913-1946
-
Late Shakespeare
-
Ireland and Scotland
-
Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print
-
The Godwinian Novel
Ágota Márton is a lecturer in English at Brasenose College, University of Oxford where she teaches literary theory and Anglophone literature from 1830 to the present. Her research interests include visual culture, novel theory, comparative literature, and literature and science.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780198983316 |
| ISBN 10 | 019898331X |
| Title | Geometries of Empathy |
| Author | Ágota Márton |
| Series | Oxford English Monographs |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | OUP Oxford |
| Year published | 2025-11-20 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |