Keynote Lectures - Modernism and Empathy

‘Empathy and the Reader’

Professor Derek Matravers

15 June 2018

D1-LP-08, 09:30-11:00

Contemporary thinking on empathy divides it into broadly two sorts. The first, 'low level empathy', is primarily a matter of sub-personal mechanisms - that is, those below the level of consciousness. The second, 'high level empathy', is primarily a matter of conscious attempts to take the perspective of others. This paper will argue that claims that reading involves empathy often confuse these levels. In sorting this out, we will be able to accept some claims, reject others, and assess the relation between those claims and the experience of the reader. Having put this framework in place, we will be in a better position to assess the claim that there is (or is not) some particular relation between readers' empathy and literary modernism.

Derek Matravers is Professor of Philosophy at The Open University and a Senior Member of Darwin College, Cambridge, UK.

‘The Complexity of Cognition: Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs’

Professor Patrick Colm Hogan

16 June 2018

D1-LP-08, 13:30-15:00

We may distinguish numerous targets, means, and functions of cognitive empathy. Dorothy Richardson’s novel points toward a number of possible qualifications of and extensions to our understanding of these topics. Most fundamentally, Richardson’s representation of her main character’s stream of consciousness suggests that our concerns with other people’s interiority may be neither as pervasive nor as deep as we are often inclined to imagine. Richardson’s treatment of the means of achieving cognitive empathy are consistent with this limitation. Specifically, Richardson presents mechanical triggers as central to our simulative understanding of other people’s feelings. These triggers are largely innate, perceptual-expressive outcomes of emotion. Richardson’s novel partially challenges the ways in which we often understand cognitive empathy, suggesting some additions to or qualifications of current thought on the topic.

Patrick Colm HOGAN is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut, where he is a member of the English Department, the Cognitive Science Program, the Program in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, and the Connecticut Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences.