English 159 - Spring, 2011

Topics in the Novel

Topic: The Novel and Empathy

Class Information

Instructor: Jerng, Mark
CRN: 32384
Time: TR 9:00-10:20
Location: 90 SS/Hum.

Description

This course explores the ways in which novels elaborate on the possibilities and limits of empathy – the process of feeling what it is like to be someone other than one’s self. Novels have long enlisted readers in this process of imagining other persons, and in doing so, they have contributed greatly to our understandings of the nature of empathy, the act of identifying with another person or thing, and our constructions of personhood and character. We will read novels from the eighteenth century to the present, ranging from picaresque tales of moral decay to sentimentalist fictions of U.S. slavery, to science fiction stories of “hyperempathy.” Along the way we will read classic and contemporary philosophical essays discussing questions concerning the role of the passions in relation to self-interest; fictions of personal identity and social selves; and our moral engagements with fictionality.

Grading

attendance and participation, two papers, final exam, in-class writing exercise.

Texts

Roxana, Daniel Defoe
Hope Leslie, Catherine Sedgwick
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Lives of Animals, J.M. Coetzee
Short Stories and Essays, course reader