Feeling in Others: Essays on Empathy and Suffering in Modern American Culture

Feeling in Others: Essays on Empathy and Suffering in Modern American Culture addresses different kinds of suffering as presented in texts, visual and verbal, and proposes empathy as an ethical exigency of the act of reading and critical tool. The volume brings together contributions from Americanists in France, Norway, Austria, Hungary, and Spain. It examines paintings, comic strips, autobiographies, fictional narratives, and poems on pain from a variety of critical perspectives, bringing together the fields of cognitive psychology, phenomenology, literary criticism, and architecture to account for the complexity of the contagious difference of pain.