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Taking Issue with History: Empathy and the Ethical Imperatives of Creative Interventions

The purpose of this thesis was to contribute to a dialogue that considers the relationship between history, literature, and empathy as a literary affect. Specifically, I explored sites of literature’s transformative potential as it relates to cultural studies and the ethics of deconstruction. Via a deconstructive, post-colonial reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I considered how subjects in our current socio-political moment can feel history.
Emerging from a post-structurally mediated engagement with history, signification, and feeling, I argued that empathy, as it is contentiously presented in the context of deconstruction, is not necessarily a reductive or essentialist approach towards relating or “being-with” an-other. Instead, I proposed that the act of reading historiographical novels that take constructions of the Atlantic Slave Trade to task might generate an affective empathy, which could in turn engender a more empathetic relationality and way of being-in-the-world.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:fiu.edu/oai:digitalcommons.fiu.edu:etd-1890
Date01 January 2012
CreatorsVera, Monica A
PublisherFIU Digital Commons
Source SetsFlorida International University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceFIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

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