Empathy and love
types of textuality and degrees of affectivity
pp. 325-345
in: Thomas Blake (ed), The Palgrave handbook of affect studies and textual criticism, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
Philosophical debates have centered on questions of why we feel for fictional others when we know that they are not real. This chapter explores instead how certain types of narratives can intensify and reshape our emotions, regardless of the factual reality of their content. Epic and novel may be more effective in inducing our empathy than journalistic reports because of how they draw upon techniques of focalization so as to create an impression of our ongoing familiarity with the suffering people they describe. Relatedly, our concept of romantic love takes shape not only as a result of biological needs but also in response to cultural expectations, which have relied on a long literary tradition of textually elicited affect within Western culture.