The Strategies of Representation of Empathy in the 20th century African-American Literature

2022 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 20K12961
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Review Section: Basic Section 02030:English literature and literature in the English language-related
• Research Institution: Mie University
• Principal Investigator: Tabata Kentaro 三重大学, 人文学部, 准教授 (10837305)
• Project Period (FY): 2020-04-01 – 2023-03-31
• Keywords: エンパシー / アフリカ系アメリカ文学

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Referring to the newly developed theories on empathy, along with some narratological insights, my research critically examined how Richard Wright's Native Son--a masterpiece by one of the first professional African-American novelists--strategically foregrounds various kinds of empathy in the story. My rigorous close-reading of the novel shows that empathy serves as a necessary first step for a reader or a fictional character to be faced with racial, political, or cultural others, and that, since the goal of the empathetic approach cannot be fully achieved, empathy requires that one take a complicated attitude in which one pays due respect to the other while getting attracted to him or her with all the more fascination because of the imperfection inhered in the empathic approach.

Free Research Field

American Literature

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

小説作品の読書における共感的・感情移入的態度の肯定的効果は、文学というジャンルの凋落の今日的状況に抵抗するためのよすがとして、無批判に喧伝されることが多いが、本研究が批判的に明らかにした成果は、その肯定的効果を一概に否定するものではないが、共感的・感情移入的読書の危うさと魅力を同時に捉えるものであり、その意義をより精緻に検討したことで、読書という行為の基盤にかかわる知見への貢献として役に立つ。