“Empathy has biological foundations, but culture determines who will be the subject of that identification”

Lynn Hunt,Carlos Cortez Minchillo,Cilza Bignotto

doi:10.1590/2596-304x20212343lhbcccm

Abstract

Abstract: Can literature promote identification with the suffering of others and an empathetic connection between readers and fictional characters? Can this sentiment of sympathy translate into social solidarity and have political consequences? In this interview, professor and historian Lynn Hunt discusses the interplay between literature and human rights and reflects on our relationship to history, the fragility of democracy, and the self and society duality.

Highlights

In a passage from one of her most recent books, History, Why It Matters? (2018) historian Lynn Hunt recalls a time at College when she and her friends used to speculate what it would have been like to live in Nazi Germany
In her acclaimed study Inventing Human Rights (2007), Hunt analyses how the eighteenth-century epistolary novels enabled readers to empathize across class, sex, and national lines and contributed to the emergence of human rights
RBLC: In Inventing Human Rights, you suggest that the epistolary novel was uniquely suited to provoke the kind of empathic response that fostered the idea of human rights in the 18th century

Summary

Introduction

In a passage from one of her most recent books, History, Why It Matters? (2018) historian Lynn Hunt recalls a time at College when she and her friends used to speculate what it would have been like to live in Nazi Germany. In her acclaimed study Inventing Human Rights (2007), Hunt analyses how the eighteenth-century epistolary novels enabled readers to empathize across class, sex, and national lines and contributed to the emergence of human rights.

Results

Conclusion