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Boler, Megan. "The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism’s Gaze." Cultural Studies 11. (1997): 253–73. Added by: joachim (7/20/09, 1:29 AM) Last edited by: joachim (10/1/11, 12:09 PM) |
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| Resource type: Journal Article Language: en: English Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1080/09502389700490141 BibTeX citation key: Boler1997 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: General Keywords: "Maus", Didactics, Reception, Sociology, Spiegelman. Art, USA Creators: Boler Collection: Cultural Studies |
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Empathy is widely embraced as a means of educating the social imagination; from John Dewey to Martha Nussbaum, Cornel West to bell hooks, we find empathy advocated as the foundation for democracy and social change. In this article I examine how students’ readings of Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, a comicbook genre depiction of his father’s survival of Nazi Germany, produces the Aristotelian version of empathy advocated by Nussbaum. This ‘passive empathy’, I argue, falls far short of assuring any basis for social change, and reinscribes a ‘consumptive’ mode of identification with the other. I invoke a ‘semiotics of empathy’, which emphasizes the power and social hierarchies which complicate the relationship between reader/listener and text/speaker. I argue that educators need to encourage what I shall define as ‘testimonial reading’ which requires the reader’s responsibility.
Added by: joachim Last edited by: joachim |