GERST 6175 - [Empathy: Affects and Sociality in Literature and Theory]

(crosslisted) COML 6136

Fall or Spring. Next Offered: 2020-2021. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Taught in English.

A. Schwarz.

Examination of affects at the intersections of aesthetics, ethics, politics, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Points of inquiry: how are social feelings of empathy, solidarity and identification evoked in literature? Do we encounter different forms of empathy according to genre, type of narrative, social structures and historical context? How do literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis describe, support, nourish, undermine or construct concepts of sociality and social life with others? What affects are outside the social realm? What are the emotive forces of tragedy and trauma in theory and fiction? Authors include: Aristotle, Burke, Lessing, Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, Freud, Massumi, Goethe, Kleist, Balzac, Kafka, Walser, Thomas Mann, Dostojewsky.