Empathy and the Critic

Ann Jurecic is assistant professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where she teaches courses in writing as well as literature and medicine. Her book Illness as Narrative is forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press. Her work has appeared in the journals Literature and Medicine, Pedagogy, and Biography as well as in College English, and she serves as book review editor for Literature and Medicine. mpathy is suddenly hot in the academy—as a topic of inquiry, if not a professional practice. Scientific researchers have discovered the existence of mirror neurons, which fire both when a person performs an action or feels an emotion and when that person views someone else having the same experience. Mirror neurons, in other words, indicate that there is a biological foundation for empathy (Iacoboni, “Imitation” and Mirroring People; Avenanti et al.; Bufalari et al.). In The Age of Empathy, primatologist Franz de Waal extends these findings by considering how innate sensitivity to faces, bodies, and voices constitutes the origin of kindness. Elsewhere, scholars from across the disciplines emphasize the importance of empathy for civil society. In The Empathic Civilization, economist and activist Jeremy Rifkin calls for the generating of “global empathy” in order to save the planet from climate change. Cognitive scientist George Lakoff maintains in The Political Mind that the success of progressive politics depends on “understand[ing] that our brains evolved for empathy, for cooperation, for connection to each other and to the earth” (267). Although not everyone agrees about the centrality of empathy to the future of the planet, there is a surprising level of agreement, from educators to politicians and philosophers, and even talk show hosts, that reading literature makes us more empathic. This consensus affirms the pedagogy of many teachers of college literature who assign works that broaden students’ understanding of human experience to encourage them to develop empathy for people very different from themselves. Such practices are also at work beyond the English classroom. For the past few decades, for example, many educators in the medical humanities, who typically teach in medical schools