Narratives of Empathy: Encounters between Animals and Humans in Philosophy, Science and Literature 1850-2010

• Applicant: Dr. Alexandra Böhm
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2015 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 272920669

Contrary to rationalist positions which emphasize the unbridgeable hiatus between humans and animals, recent studies on animal-human-relationships accentuate the capacity of empathy for understanding the other in spite of species differences. Starting from this suggestion the project will analyze from a diachronic and systematic perspective narratives of empathy in the 19th and 20th century. Currently a lot of attention is paid to the concept of empathy, whereas the history of the term, which reaches back to the early 18th century, is hardly noticed in this context. One of the basic assumptions of the envisaged study is that from the middle of the 19th century empathic approaches toward the non-human other are increasingly developed in theory and praxis against a rationalist discourse, which asserts a distinct line of demarcation between animals and humans. The comparative project will trace narratives of empathy from the middle of the 19th century up to the present in philosophical, scientific, and literary texts which focus on the encounter between humans and animals. The project will first ask how narratives of empathy contest epistemological theories and anthropological demarcations between humanity and animality. Here the question will be posed whether the species boundaries are shifted by the specific narrative staging of empathic human-animal-relations; and further, whether the breakage with a rationalist model of difference will disclose alternative practices and possibilities of thinking. Secondly the staged empathic emotional knowledge shall be put in relation to the contemporary zoological knowledge, and be located in the animal apparatus of the period, respectively. Thirdly, the final questions will be which diachronic alterations can be discerned, regarding the concept of empathy in human-animal-relations, and in which way they relate to the specific narrative structure and poetic form of the analyzed texts.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants