Speaker
Description
This paper investigates the possibility of transcending sympathy’s limitations through imaginative engagement with the other via literature.
Beginning with an analysis of reasons why Smithian sympathy resists universalization, the paper then explores literature’s potential as a tool for extending sympathy’s operation.
To illustrate this, the paper then focuses upon Gustave de Beaumont’s prize-winning 19th-century novel, Marie, or On Slavery. Through this novel, which tells the story of an idealistic young Frenchman’s doomed involvement with a beautiful mulatto and her brother, Beaumont attempts to overcome the limitations of his white readers’ sympathetic gazes and to cultivate in them a more democratic sympathetic engagement, inclusive of previously marginalized American Blacks and Native Peoples.
| Organization | Singapore Management University |
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