Negative Empathy in Literature and the Arts

Negative empathy is a peculiar type of empathetic relationship that is ambivalent and destabilizing, inspiring attraction and repulsion all at once. It is the kind of empathetic relationship art consumers often establish with characters, figures, performances, objects, compositions, and spaces that have a negative connotation or that evoke a primary violence. Over the course of this book, we argue that negative empathy is a specific aesthetic experience that intrinsically tests the limits of art consumers’ capacity to take an ethical stance and art’s potential to provoke moral reflection on the fate of collective life. Through the elaboration of an overarching theory of negative empathy and its application in a number of case studies , then, this research allows us to get new insights into how literature and art work. More precisely, we demonstrate negative empathy’s tremendous potential to unearth the strategies through which certain works put radically in question the relationship between etics and aesthetics, identification and estrangement, sublimation and catharsis. Our approach to these issues is quintessentially comparative and intermedial, as we work at the crossroads of literary, film, and media studies, art history, psychology, and aesthetics.