Geometries of Empathy: Modernism, Attention, and the Contemporary Novel

What does it mean to empathize today?

Virginia Woolf was convinced that ’the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved’, first and foremost, to ’express character.’ But to what extent can the novel capture the ’unlimited capacity and infinite variety’ of other minds and lives?

By revealing the origins of the term ’empathy’ in modernist aesthetics, Ágota Márton offers a radical new perspective on the contemporary novel. Translated into English in 1908 from the German Einfühlung, empathy did not initially mean sharing or understanding the feelings of another human. It described imaginative projection into a work of art or an object. Empathy implied unknowability, un-ownability. Hesitancy and withholding, even self-erasure, become intrinsic to understanding the outer world.

This aesthetic phenomenology profoundly informed modernist experiments in the novel. But it is also deeply relevant to post-millennial fiction. Through explicit dialogue with their modernist predecessors, novelists such as Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Rachel Cusk, Amit Chaudhuri, and Ciaran Carson experiment with attentional modes that test the scale and sources, the very possibility, of empathic exchange. In their work, there are no fixed subject positions; transparent access to others is impossible. This volume shows how empathy with others must instead be mediated through geometrical shapes and forms: circles, lines, rectangles, surfaces, symmetries, prisms of attention. Sculpting new modes of detached immersion, these novelists are rethinking what it means to ’make space’ for the other.

Ágota Márton, Lecturer in English, Brasenose College, University of Oxford

Ágota Márton is a lecturer in English at Brasenose College, University of Oxford where she teaches literary theory and Anglophone literature from 1830 to the present. Her research interests include visual culture, novel theory, comparative literature, and literature and science.