The Foggy Window: Passive Empathy and the Fight for Testimonial Reading in Neoliberal Higher Education

The concept of empathy and its value to literary studies is new and exciting and contentious. Megan Boler theorises the different kinds of empathy a reader might experience when engaging with a text and how these ‘kinds’ have important consequences both in and out of the classroom. ‘Passive empathy’ is argued to be risky because it has the potential to fetishise the pain of the other. Conversely, ‘testimonial reading’ offers the reader an opportunity to situate their cultural and social context in relation to the other and witness their experience rather than consume it. In this chapter, I explore Boler’s argument and her taxonomy of empathy to think through questions involving the empathetic exchange between reader and fiction, altruism and empathy, and the pedagogical goals of reading fiction in our neoliberal world.