Rereading Empathy

Emily Johansen is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University, USA. She is the author of Cosmopolitanism and Place: Spatial Forms in Contemporary Anglophone Literature (2014) and co-editor, with Alissa G. Karl, of Neoliberalism and the Novel (2016). Alissa G. Karl is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Brockport, USA. She is author of Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Stein, Woolf and Nella Larsen (2009), and co-editor, with Emily Johansen, of Neoliberalism and the Novel (2016).

• Introduction: Why Empathy? Why Now?Emily Johansen (Texas A&M University, USA) and Alissa G. Karl (State University of New York, Brockport, USA)1. Reading George Eliot in the #metoo EraSusan Bruxvoort Lipscomb (Houghton College, USA)2. Putting Empathy to Work: Narrative and the Empathetic EntrepreneurEmily Johansen (Texas A&M University, USA)3. ‘You’ Can’t Feel My Pain: The Limits of Empathy in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American LyricRalph Clare (Boise State University, USA)4. Limits to Empathy: On the Motif of Failed Empathy in Julian BarnesPeter Simonsen (University of Southern Denmark, Denmark) and Marie-Elisabeth Lei Holm (University of Southern Denmark, Denmark)5. Unsettling Empathy: Hassan Blasim, the Iraq War, and the Spectacle of The Corpse ExhibitionTerri Tomsky (University of Alberta, Canada)6. Rachel Cusk’s Empathy WorkAlissa G. Karl (State University of New York, Brockport, USA)7. Affective Possibilities Beyond EmpathyKathryn Cai (Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow with PowerSwitch Action, USA)8. Affective Misplacement and The Image CityTate Shaw (State University of New York, Brockport, USA)Index

Rereading Empathy offers a fascinating and timely engagement with historical and contemporary literary and cultural dynamics and politics of empathy. It addresses a rich array of themes and issues relevant to the logics, possibilities and politics of empathy and, in particular, to the practices and implications of ‘rereading empathy’ today.