Empathy and Its Limits

Empathy has been rediscovered and reshaped since the year 2000 as a concept with great interdisciplinary potential in neuroscience, socio-biology, psychology and the humanities. It is generally acknowledged as a vital emotional and social resource in a world faced with the challenges of globalization and the limitations of an endangered ecosystem. Empathy might be a unique human endowment, but we still know very little about the circumstances under which it is aroused or blocked. With its focus on the 'limits of empathy', this book therefore analyzes not only the cultural contexts that account for the generating and fostering of empathy, but also focuses on its limits and the mechanisms that lead to its blocking. Complementary to the current research in the natural sciences that celebrates the quintessential human capacity for empathy, this study will look more closely into the precarious status of empathy, its unreliability and intentional withdrawal.

Aleida Assmann is Emeritus Professor of the University of Konstanz, Germany where she held the Chair for English Literature and Literary Studies from 1993-2014. She received an Honorary Degree from the University of Oslo (2008), the Max Planck Research Award (2009) and the A.H. Heineken Price for History of the NKAW. Her main areas of research are historical anthropology, history of media, history and theory of reading and writing, cultural memory, with special emphasis on Holocaust and trauma. Her publications in English include Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories (ed. with Sebastian Conrad, 2010), Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (2012), Memory and Political Change (ed. with Linda Shortt, 2012) and Introduction to Cultural Studies: Topics, Concepts, Issues (2012).

Ines Detmers studied English, American and Spanish Literature at Duisburg, Oxford and Barcelona. She has worked as a lecturer in British Cultural Studies and English literature and is currently Research and Publication Assistant at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Her research interests cover contemporary British poetry and the modern Anglophone novel with a special focus on gender, genre and memory.