The Role of Empathy in Literary Reading: From Einfühlung to the Neuroscience of Embodied Cognition, with the Example of Kafka's The Metamorphosis

Abstract:In the second half of the nineteenth century, Hermann Lotze, Robert Vischer, and Theodor Lipps pioneered the notion of Einfühlung, a term translated into the English empathy by Edward Titchener in 1911. This article investigates the role of empathy in literary reading by reconnecting it to its origins in the theories of Einfühlung and by revisiting these theories in the light of neuropsychological studies of embodied cognition carried out since the nineties. Contemporary to the coinage of the term empathy and to the broader dissemination of the notion of Einfühlung, Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915) is here used as a test terrain for the hypotheses generated by this investigation. Kafka's novella shows us how literature can use "fantastic cognition" (Kukkonen) to open a space of empathic indetermination in which the reader can resonate with structures of feeling extended beyond "normal" human sensorimotor forms.