Sympathetic Imagination Research Articles

The Ruth in (T)ruth: Redactive Reading and Feminist Provocations to History in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!

This essay coins the concept of redactive reading to describe a method for interpreting women’s absences in racialized and gendered histories of collective trauma through M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 poem, Zong! In 1781, the Zong crew murdered as many as 150 African captives following a water shortage and tried to claim insurance on victims. Gregson v. Gilbert denied plaintiffs the right to profit from murder without indicting anyone for the atrocity. This diasporic Caribbean poet revives mythological figures—notably, the biblical Ruth—to expose Western law and the English language as insidious tools of epistemic violence. In naming three archetypes that reincarnate “ruth”— the rebellious slave, the lady of society, and the raped whore—this article interrogates the white, patriarchal, imperialist imaginary behind the massacre. Redactive reading is a strategy for reading femininity as a structuring absence on which canons of exclusion—from legal rights to representational politics and the sympathetic imagination—are built.

From Ghosted Images to Ancestral Stories: Spectres and Narrators in Dickens' Great Expectations

From Ghosted Images to Ancestral Stories:Spectres and Narrators in Dickens' Great Expectations Gavriel Reisner (bio) I Visual Perception and Verbal Reception As the narrator and the protagonist of Great Expectations, Pip has two distinct identities. A speaker in the present and an actor in the past, his divided role creates narrative complexity. The two Pips separate and connect in a creative relationship that drives the novel. Tracing his development as it happens, Pip understands his story by telling it. The changes in self-understanding are reflected outward and seen, by both him and the reader, as changes in the characters around him. Thus, two contrasting ways of apprehending others are achieved in Great Expectations: first, the visual way, where others are perceived by their images, and, afterward, the verbal way, where they are experienced in their stories. We meet the character Pip as a suffering orphan when he is five or six years old. Early on his child's mind houses an imagination intimidated by frightening appearances—he receives speech more in the impression it makes than in the meaning it holds. The result is a superficial (supra/facial) or sur/face mode of perception. As he grows up, Pip moves into the story mode of reception, where he listens as well as looks. Taking in the words with their overtones, he achieves more complicated integrations in his way of understanding others. Like Pip, for this goes beyond a particular child-character to a wider human experience, we perceive others better when we receive their narratives, not limited to what we see, but open to what they say. Combining perception and reception, we [End Page 223] process impressions. Listening to stories we piece together a comprehensive tale comprised of memories and experiences, shared in the combined knowledge of listener and teller, and received by a sympathetic imagination to achieve a full narrative. II Time in Loewald, Space in Winnicott The movement from image to word in Dickens' novel finds a parallel in psychoanalytic theory. In his "On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis" (1960), Hans Loewald writes about ghosts and ancestors as two ways of understanding the parental figures within us.1 Among our inner objects, there are the ghosts who haunt us. Versions of bad parents, these are static presences trailing unresolved issues and calling us back into the past. Opposed to these ghosts are the strengthening ancestors, internal images of the good parent allowing an independent state of being demonstrated by the capacity to live in the present. Loewald traces the bridge from ghosts to ancestors in the process he calls internalization. Here the constructive influences from the past are strengthened in analysis itself; we grow in the analytic dialogue. We move forward in the presence of an insightful therapist who incarnates a lost or never found good parent. The movement from one mode to the other, in both Dickens and Loewald, necessitates a certain kind of supportive presence, a good object who is also a speaking object. That good parent, the ancestor, may underlie the bad parent, the ghost, but the lost connection needs to be found in dialogue with a current presence. In Loewald, we are talking about a temporal process, speech in time; this therapeutic action occurs within the subject over time working in language between past, present, and future. D.W. Winnicott notes the importance of a "good-enough" object, one who neither stays too far from nor comes too close to the subject. But where Loewald is notably concerned with time, Winnicott places development in space. Tracing growth in what he calls "going on being" (1956, p. 303), Winnicott [End Page 224] considers experience in the outer actuality of place, as well as experience in the inner abstraction of time.2 Not focusing mainly on therapeutic experience, Winnicott looks to developmental experience generally; yet, as in Loewald, the movement forward necessitates a supportive, non-interfering good object. We can enrich the concept of going from ghosts to ancestors by considering that all-important passage forward in relation to Winnicott's own notions around transitional or potential space and the good-enough figure who helps us negotiate the crossover. In the in-between area...

Reconciliation, White Shame, and the Sympathetic Imagination in Ian Holding's <em>Of Beasts and Beings</em>

In this article, I read the postcolonial Bildung that Ian Holding's protagonist undergoes in Of Beasts and Beings in the context of Zimbabwe's policy of reconciliation. On becoming aware of his whiteliness, this character, prompted by shame, writes a narrative in which he projects himself into the position of a black person. I argue that this act of imaginative identification may be read as the white protagonist's attempt to reconcile with his black compatriots, but also show that the form of reconciliation here involved is dialectical in nature rather than assimilative. Thus conceived, reconciliation places the two races in a dialectical relationship that posits the possibility of their sublation and with it the attainment of a truly postcolonial condition. I, however, go on to argue that the novel self-reflexively questions its representation of this post-racial state by acknowledging its own implication in colonial history. Through a critique of its shameful complicity with this history, it casts doubt on the ability of the sympathetic imagination to enable a transcendence of the discourses of whiteness. Finally, I contend that the novel's desire for transcendence, despite its awareness of its implication in colonial history, invests it with an ambivalence that allows it to negotiate the problem of the shamefulness of white, postcolonial writing.

Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel: Fielding to Austen. Roger Maioli. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. vii+202.

<i>Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel: Fielding to Austen</i>. Roger Maioli. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. vii+202.

Age of Visual Culture, Construction of Hyperreal World and Sympathetic Imagination

미디어 플랫폼이 전환되면서 주류 문화양식으로 영상콘텐츠가 대두되자 사람들의 사유 방식도 문자문화에서 영상문화로 변화되었다. 구비문화적 속성을 가진 영상콘텐츠sms 의식의 퇴행이 아닌 물리적 현실과 환상적 사유가 결합되는 새로운 하이퍼리얼 세계를 구축해 내는 방향으로 나아가고 있다. 오늘날 드라마와 웹툰은 현실과 가상이 중첩된 하이퍼리얼 세상을 구축하고 있었고, 드라마는 현실 세계를 벗어난 가상 세계를 계속해서 창조해 내고 있었다. 이러한 이질적 문화 경험에도 사람들이 드라마에 열광하고, 허구적 표상을 실재보다 더 실재 같다고 여기는 것은 공감적 상상력 때문이다. 하이퍼리얼의 세상을 공감적 상상력을 토대로 표현해 내는 드라마와 웹툰은 인간이 삶에 대한 애착과 관계를 재구성해 내고 있었다. 하이퍼리얼의 세계를 보여주는 드라마와 웹툰에서는 사실을 분석하기보다는 공감을 통해 타인과의 관계를 변화시키고 있었다.As the media platform was transformed, the content of the mainstream culture style was transformed from the character culture to the visual culture. The visual content should be shown to be able to enjoy new amusement by combining scientific and logical digital technology with cultural characteristics. It is necessary to move toward the establishment of a new hyperreal world in which visual content with cultural attributes is not a regression of consciousness but a combination of physical reality and fantasy. Dramas and Webtoon alone have limitations in referring to video content. Through subsequent research, it is necessary to present the direction in which video content including movies, plays, musicals, and web dramas should go forward. Nevertheless, I think that this study is meaningful in that it has revealed what kind of world God and human existence form in drama and webtoon which are popular in the masses.

Displacement as Trauma: the Sympathetic Imagination of Furuno Kikuo’s ‘Tenpō’

Displacement as Trauma: the Sympathetic Imagination of Furuno Kikuo’s ‘Tenpō’

The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination

The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination

Literature/Ethics/Reading

The chapters on ethics and / of reading in Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature across Continents propose two models of responding to literature. Ghosh sees literature as embodying a hunger for Otherness. Miller insists on the ethical authority of a given literary work over the reader, its ethical obligations to the characters within and to the readers it addresses, and the ethical acts and decisions of the characters within the work. Ghosh's account of literature as hunger opens up aesthetics to the question of the ethical, including the ethics of representation, reading, and Othering. Along with Miller's formula for reading ethically, the two chapters offer us an approach that may be termed, after Kwame Anthony Appiah, cosmopolitan reading, made possible by the sympathetic imagination that literature embodies.

셸리의 프로메테우스적 언어 : 혁명, 사랑, 상상력의 언어

This essay examines Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound with close attention to his view of language as presented in the drama. Here Shelley emphasizes the constitutive role of language in the formation of thought—an idea of language that has been termed “Promethean” in Shelley criticism. Promethean speech has the performative capacity for love, which is the core of Shelleyan morality and whose embodiment in the drama is Asia, Prometheus’s lover. Shelley believes that only the power of love, rather than of hatred, brings about a true revolution and ends all tyranny for good. According to Shelley, feelings of love are powerfully aroused by reading poetry, since this increases our capability for sympathetic imagination. Promethean language consists of poetic metaphors, which are arbitrarily produced by the imagination. By appropriating imaginatively the arbitrariness of language, the central tenet of Locke’s linguistic philosophy, the poet can bring metaphorical vitality to a dying language. This revitalized or Promethean language serves to reshape our understanding of the world, promotes our moral improvement, and launches a universal revolution in political and social systems—which ultimately results in the establishment of “our great Republic.”

Young Man and War

When The New York Times sent David Halberstam to the Congo in August 1961, he seemed ill-prepared to report on a country betwixt and between its colonial past and its strife-ridden future. Halberstam, however, soon proved to have an instinct for depicting an alien culture from the inside out rather than from the outside in. His determination to prod his readers “to see and sense what the Congo really looks like, what it really is” caused him to discard the Cold War framework through which he had initially viewed the Congo Crisis and adopt a kind of empathetic reporting that resembled what the poet John Keats called “negative capability.” Halberstam learned in the Congo that the truth cannot always be discovered by affixing the right conceptual lenses to the proper equipment. Sometimes the truth is so complex, multi-layered, and culturally elusive that one can discover it only through an act of sympathetic imagination.

Responsible Innovation: a Smithian Perspective

Adam Smith’s is often falsely portrayed as having argued that radical selfishness is a force for the good and that this “invisible hand’ is his market mechanism. This paper argues that Smith’s real market mechanism, the sympathy manoeuvre, is a viable alternative to Schumpeterian and mainstream models of innovation in economics and also could help build a firmer theoretical basis for other approaches such as Responsible Innovation. To Smith all human activity was social and must be understood and explained in terms of the sentiments involved. Discovery, for instance, is driven by three sentiments (wonder, surprise, admiration), economic activities by sympathetic imagination, the need for exchange, the need to better one’s position in life, and the need for gratitude. Through sympathetic imagination, his famous model of the impartial spectator, Smith elegantly connects the individual and society. Smith’s innovation process is thus an exercise in social construction and not a destructive process based on radical selfishness. The paper argues that this social innovation process is a viable alternative to the extant approaches that are essentially asocial and amoral (economism) or ideologically normative (Responsible Innovation).

Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. by James M. Dean and Harriet Spiegel

Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde. Edited by James M. Dean and Harriet Spiegel. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2016. Pp. lxviii, 391. ISBN: 978-155481-005-5. $19.95 (paperback); $13.95 (ebook).When I first started teaching medieval literature at the university level, there were no adequate teaching editions of Chaucer's great, yet difficult poem Troilus and Criseyde. It is experientially hard for the 'yonge, fresshe folks, he or she' addressed in the poem's envoi to gain access to it except through feats of the sympathetic imagination. Before we even get there, though, both the poem's language and its imbrication in an increasingly inaccessible literary tradition daunt the fresh young contemporary readers of Middle English. Unlike the Canterbury Tales, for the Troilus there has been little in the way of pedagogical materials that would help bridge the gap between the poem's demands and the skills and experience of its new readers.We are now gifted with two excellent teaching editions of the Troilus: alongside the Norton, edited by Stephen A. Barney and using the same critical text as the standard Riverside Chaucer, Broadview now offers this new edition, whose different textual basis and supplementary choices make it a worthy alternative more suitable in many pedagogical situations. Its text is based on a single manuscript, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Manuscript 61 (Cp), emended from other manuscripts only where the base manuscript is clearly defective. As the editors note, Cp is an excellent witness from the first quarter of the fifteenth century, easily available in digital format as well as facsimile for anyone who wishes to check a reading. As a consequence of the single-text approach, the notes treat textual considerations more frequently than is usual in teaching editions, and account for every major editorial intervention. For courses in Chaucer or medieval literature, these notes seem directed less toward students than toward instructors, who may be more familiar with the Riverside edition and thus would benefit from the orientation to this text. Otherwise the notes offer clear paraphrases of difficult passages, with relatively few gestures toward other literary works important to the poem's complex intertextuality. Marginal glosses are generous, which makes up partly for the too-brief glossary. Anyone wishing to pay detailed attention to lexis, however, would need to consult other reference works like the Middle English Dictionary or A Chaucer Glossary.The text is accompanied by an up-to-date introduction covering Chaucer's life and times, his literary affiliations, and his professional positions in the king's household; brief treatments of the literary tradition behind Troilus, the poem's characters, structure, philosophical stance, and pagan setting; versification and reception; and a succinct summary of many of the influential interpretations of the poem from the comparatist approach of Lewis, through the debates between patristic exegetes and New Critics; and also attending to feminist, new historicist, postmodern, and queer theory approaches. …

Vulnerable Bodies in Antjie Krog’s Begging to Be Black

In Begging to Be Black, Krog grapples with the idea of the vulnerable body as a response to Njabulo S Ndebele’s inaugural Steve Biko Memorial Lecture (delivered in 2000). She expresses her loyalty to literary non-fiction in somatic terms: she hopes that it allows her potentially to discover a “thinning of skin” that avoids the imaginative challenges of fiction. I show how Krog responds to Ndebele’s speech through two key intertexts in Begging to Be Black, and asks whether the preoccupation of the text with the idea of the vulnerable body paradoxically elides the particularities of embodied experience. Begging to Be Black incorporates J M Coetzee’s Disgrace (2000 [1999]) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness 1988 [1899] in order to test the limits of the sympathetic imagination and understand what it means to share in bodily vulnerability, particularly in the light of racially differentiated experience.

When Adam met Sally: The Transformative Potential of Sympathy

This paper adopts the view promoted by early modern philosopher Adam Smith that exercises of the sympathetic imagination play an important role in supporting human sociability and ethical behaviour. It argues that such exercises have potential to significantly change the way in which privileged racial identities relate to marginalised and devalued racial identities. First, the paper draws on Sally Haslanger’s reflections upon her lived experience of transracial parenting to illustrate how sympathetic identification with the experiences of a differently racialized individual can transform the way in which we relate to entire racial groups. Haslanger’s account demonstrates the potential for exercises of the sympathetic imagination to disrupt the way in which we experience our own embodiment, and to generate a form of knowledge that implicates our sense of self and will to act. Second, the paper discusses some limitations of appealing to sympathy as a social resource in less intimate contexts. This discussion throws light on the importance of exercising a critically reflective mode of sympathy to overcome racial bias, in addition to the importance of institutional design and grassroots initiatives in facilitating sympathetic identification across racial lines.

Review: Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination

Book Review| March 01 2016 Review: Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART NOVEMBER 22, 2015–FEBRUARY 21, 2016 Jody Zellen Jody Zellen JODY ZELLEN is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2016) 43 (5): 26–27. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2016.43.5.26 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jody Zellen; Review: Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination. Afterimage 1 March 2016; 43 (5): 26–27. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2016.43.5.26 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2015 Afterimage/Visual Studies Workshop, unless otherwise noted. Reprints require written permission and acknowledgement of previous publication in Afterimage.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination by Sotirios Paraschas

The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination by Sotirios Paraschas

The Maternal Love and Sympathetic Imagination in Wordsworth’s “The Thorn,” “The Idiot Boy,” “The Sailor’s Mother,” and “The Mad Mother.”

The Maternal Love and Sympathetic Imagination in Wordsworth’s “The Thorn,” “The Idiot Boy,” “The Sailor’s Mother,” and “The Mad Mother.”

The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination

The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination

A LITERATURA NA AULA DE LÍNGUA ESTRANGEIRA E A COMPETÊNCIA INTERCULTURAL

Este ensaio pretende demonstrar as virtualidades do texto literário para a promoção da Competência Intercultural. Enquanto na atualidade a educação literária é considerada muitas vezes irrelevante, já a Competência Intercultural (ou a competência plurilingue e pluricultural no Quadro Europeu Comum de Referência para as línguas do Conselho da Europa) é o princípio organizador dos curricula de línguas. Mas a leitura literária pressupõe o mesmo tipo de competências que estão envolvidas na Competência Intercultural, a mesma estratégia dialógica, a mesma abertura à alteridade, a mesma tolerância face à indeterminação. A consciência crítica intercultural, o traço essencial do falante intercultural na formulação de Byram, é mais do que a simples abordagem orientada para ação que é visível no Quadro Europeu Comum de Referência, e pressupõe a capacidade de lidar com exigências mais complexas ao mesmo tempo que tem um vigor imaginativo que pode reconfigurar a condição humana. A literatura, o texto intercultural por excelência, é um recurso metodológico útil para a Competência Intercultural e adequa-se a estratégias pedagógicas que envolvem a comunicação em linha e as novas tecnologias da informação e comunicação, assumindo a ligação entre pedagogia e criatividade.

The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination

The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination