Negative Empathy in Literature and the Arts (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature) - Hardcover

Ercolino, Stefano; Fusillo, Massimo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1032958723 ISBN 13: 9781032958729

Publisher: Routledge, 2025

Synopsis

Negative Empathy in Literature and the Arts explores how readers and viewers engage cognitively and affectively with ethically troubling artworks across literature, the visual and performing arts, and screen media. Drawing on aesthetics, cultural history and theory, psychology, and neuroscience, Stefano Ercolino and Massimo Fusillo introduce the concept of “negative empathy” to describe the ambivalent and destabilizing emotional responses elicited by representations of negativity in art. Rather than dismissing empathy as naïve, the authors argue for a more nuanced understanding of its darker forms and their cognitive and ethical value. Through a comparative and intermedial approach, the book analyzes case studies from Littell’s The Kindly Ones to Wilson’s Deafman Glance; from Verdi’s Macbeth and Nitsch’s Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries to Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, Mapplethorpe’s “X” Portfolio, Kiefer’s The Seven Heavenly Palaces, Haneke’s The White Ribbon, and Gilligan’s Breaking Bad―offering a compelling new theory of aesthetic engagement.

About this title

About the Author

Stefano Ercolino teaches literary theory and comparative literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He is the author of The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” to Roberto Bolaño’s “2666” and The Novel-Essay, 1884–1947. He co-edited Experimental Criticism: Franco Moretti and Literature.

Massimo Fusillo teaches comparative literature at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. He is the author of several books, including The Fetish: Literature, Cinema, Visual Art. He co-edited The Gesamtkunstwerk as Synergy of the Arts and Thinking Narratively: Between Novel-Essay and Narrative Essay.

From the Back Cover

It introduces the concept of “negative empathy” to examine how readers and viewers engage emotionally and cognitively with ethically troubling artworks. Through a comparative and intermedial approach, it offers a compelling new theory of aesthetic engagement with representations of negativity in art.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1032958723
• ISBN 13: 9781032958729
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 198