Modernist Empathy in American Literature: William Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Richard Wright

In this dissertation that discusses the American novels by William Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Richard Wright, I delineate the concept of modernist empathy as a radical urge for intersubjective immediacy, while adjusting the concept of empathy as each situation requires instead of squeezing various manifestations of empathy into a single, standardized definition. I observe how those writers struggle to represent modernist empathy by differentiating it from its similar psychological phenomena, especially sympathy. Instead of establishing empathy's predominance over sympathy, however, I pay detailed attention to the constantly oscillating dynamic between a modernist urge for empathic immediacy and a realistic compromise of sympathetic distancing, thus revealing empathy's instability and ambiguity. After briefly overviewing Amy Coplan's conceptualization of empathy and sketching three categories of narrative empathy in the introduction, I have explained the concept of modernist empathy in the first chapter. In doing so, I first examine the discourse that surrounded the concept of empathy at the time, contrasting modernist empathy with its sisterly concept of sympathy. Then, since empathy and sympathy do not always form a clear dichotomy, I have argued that modernist empathy should be captured in the process of the oscillating dynamic between modernist urge for empathy and sympathetic compromise of distancing. In the second chapter, I have discussed how modernist empathy is manifested in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury according to the three categories of narrative empathy. First, I have analyzed the novel's experimental narrative in terms of readerly empathy. Then, I have discussed the novel's empathic and anti-empathic characters as manifestations of represented empathy. Finally, I have examined Faulkner's writerly empathy, and I have observed how he embraces the ultimate instability of modernist empathy. In the third chapter, by considering Nathanael West as a late modernist, I have argued that his novels are critiques of modernist empathy. In the analysis of his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, I have revealed West's dichotomy between intellectual distancing and emotional involvement. Then, I have attempted to depict how West dramatizes his protagonists' failures of empathy in Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. In the process, I critique Martha Nussbaum's theory of compassion in relation to empathy. I also consider the relationship of empathy to the advent of the anonymous mass in the 1930s and observed West's critique of empathy at the age of mass culture. The focus of the final chapter is about the writerly design of the strategic use of empathy in Richard Wright's Native Son. After reviewing the past literary criticism of the novel's empathy, I have discussed how the novel is strategized to establish an intimate readerly empathy with Bigger Thomas. At the end of the argument, I examine the author's strategic design of empathy and its relation to racial politics.