Overview

Negative Empathy in Literature and the Arts explores how readers and viewers engage cognitively and affectively with ethically troubling artworks across literature, the visual and performing arts, and screen media. Drawing on aesthetics, cultural history and theory, psychology, and neuroscience, Stefano Ercolino and Massimo Fusillo introduce the concept of “negative empathy” to describe the ambivalent and destabilizing emotional responses elicited by representations of negativity in art. Rather than dismissing empathy as naïve, the authors argue for a more nuanced understanding of its darker forms and their cognitive and ethical value. Through a comparative and intermedial approach, the book analyzes case studies from Littell’s The Kindly Ones to Wilson’s Deafman Glance; from Verdi’s Macbeth and Nitsch’s Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries to Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, Mapplethorpe’s “X” Portfolio, Kiefer’s The Seven Heavenly Palaces, Haneke’s The White Ribbon, and Gilligan’s Breaking Bad—offering a compelling new theory of aesthetic engagement.

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9781032958729

Table of Contents

Reviews

This timely contribution to narrative aesthetics revives and critically builds out from an underutilized aesthetic concept with theoretical nuance and creativity. -Sianne Ngai, George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English, University of Chicago, USA Ercolino and Fusillo take Lipps’ notion of negative empathy and do some serious reconceptualizing aimed at making it a key item in the aesthetician’s toolbox. The result is an illuminating, often disturbing bringing together of works in many media: from Medea to Macbeth (opera), from Caravaggio to Kiefer. -Greg Currie, Emeritus Professor, University of York, UK Ercolino and Fusillo cast a great deal of light on the imaginative empathy that, despite our moral distance, we extend to objectionable characters in literature and the arts. Original, analytically acute, and culturally rich. -Garry L. Hagberg, author of Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood Stefano Ercolino and Massimo Fusillo’s study explores the dark side of empathetic responses to fiction, offering striking insights into its cognitive, ethical, and affective potential. Meticulously researched and supported by a broad range of close readings from multiple media, this book represents a major contribution to debates on narrative empathy. -Marco Caracciolo, Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory, Ghent University, Belgium Macbeth, Caravaggio, Marina Abramovic and Walter White – This book traces “negative empathy” from the short duration of an image, a theatre play, and a performance to the long duration of novels and TV series, introducing empathy’s conflicted sibling and demonstrating how it provokes engagement and reflective distance in audiences. -Karin Kukkonen, Professor, University of Oslo, Norway

Author Information

Stefano Ercolino teaches literary theory and comparative literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He is the author of The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” to Roberto Bolaño’s “2666” and The Novel-Essay, 1884–1947. He co-edited Experimental Criticism: Franco Moretti and Literature. Massimo Fusillo teaches comparative literature at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. He is the author of several books, including The Fetish: Literature, Cinema, Visual Art. He co-edited The Gesamtkunstwerk as Synergy of the Arts and Thinking Narratively: Between Novel-Essay and Narrative Essay.

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