Rachael Burke English 724 Professional Writing December 15, 2014 Empathy: Genre, Human “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Victor Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning (1985) Logotherapist, Holocaust Survivor
Empathy as a Rhetorical Problem: “Understanding other people should indeed be very hard” (Keysers, 2011). Empathy is enjoying a time of robust conceptual exploration, examination, and possible redefinition. For behavioral/social/developmental psychologists, clinical and health psychologists, cognitive-affective neuroscientists neuropsychologists, anthropologists and some rhetoricians this term is one of great debate and intellectual dispute precisely because it enjoys popular as well as professionalized use. There is vast disparity, however, between the elegantly simplified way in which the masses embrace the term “empathy” and the highly nuanced and terminologically evolving way in which practitioners who study and methodologically facilitate empathy understand and use this term. While there are many words that have multiplicitous conceptualizations, empathy is a bit unique: it seems our ability to be empathetic well outpaces our ability to describe empathy and its mechanisms. This has always been a problem for empathy and its practitioners—a problem for all of us. As Christian Keysers asks in The Empathic Brain: How the Discovery of Mirror Neurons Changes our Understanding of Human Nature (2011), “How do we do it? How do we manage to feel what is concealed?” (pg. 9). Answering this question on any level means we find ourselves reaching for descriptive language—more and better descriptive language—
for what is an inherently human quality. Describing (and prescribing) empathy is often left to “professionals” (though this term, too, is problematic), and this practice has produced as much confusion as clarity. It may be, then, that the so-called “empathy deficit” (Obama, 2013) is partly a deficit of how we treat empathy’s vocabulary, but this lexical impoverishment stands to leave us unable to socially connect and maximize what empathy, itself, has to offer. This is essentially a language problem—a rhetorical problem. “Empathy” has been neglected, and we are lagging in our ability to facilitate other professions’ intercommunication because we have not given this concept enough disciplinary discernment. Perhaps if we understand empathy as a rhetorical concept better—with the goal of looking forward to creating more nuance and potential for terminological and generic evolution within our own field—empathy, itself, would be easier to cross-disciplinarily (and interpersonally) facilitate, enact, and respect. Empathy in rhetoric is problematic in its unsettled complexity: its inclusivity and, at times, exclusivity. In this discussion, we will look at several of empathy’s rhetorical incarnations, including: aesthetic valuation, psychoanalytic methodology/ethnology, empirical/clinical process, humanist narrativity, transculturalism, therapeutic process, cognitive/affective process, rhetorics of proximity and silence, and active rhetorical strategy. This is by no means a comprehensive list of “empathy in rhetoric,” nor is this a comprehensive “review of empathy.” However, with a list this varied, one must ask: Is there any unity in empathy at all? Rhetoric’s relationship with empathy might be explained as the generic attempt to conceptually unify empathy across theoretical and applicatory divides, though it is not clear if we have historically helped or harmed this goal. It is also not clear if unifying empathy is either possible or desirable. A review of empathy and rhetoric reveals the subversive and complex power of empathy as rhetoric, but this dynamic must be understood as a tandem co-construction within the ideological systems of sister disciplines, particularly the social/psychological sciences. This developmental history is a convoluted and often misused one, and, thus, I will argue, has distorted our ability to see empathy’s distinct rhetorical theoretical value. In short, we as rhetoricians don’t know what to do with empathy. However, this is appropriate: the context in which empathy has generically evolved as a rhetorical construct doesn’t
quite know what to do with empathy either—our current confusion is forgivable. As C. Daniel Batson (1999) says, “students of empathy can seem a cantankerous lot” and they are largely so because “opportunities for disagreement abound” within the framework of empathy’s theoretical uncertainties. Professional rhetoric cannot completely solve these theoretical problems; however, we can begin to approach empathy in a less divisive and dismissive way, and we must. Empathy as theory, methodology, concept-practice, and cultural phenomenology need guidance, rhetorically so. Empathy as Social Genre Though it is not a perfect solution, I would like to suggest that we handle empathy as a tentative social genre in this analysis, or at least attempt to begin classifying empathy as a potential genre for future consideration. I readily admit that this evaluation of empathy may be imperfect, and, in a broader sense, empathy is more than rhetoric alone can effectively describe. However, if useful, comprehensive theoretical language is to exist at all, we should at least try to understand how to bridge the gap between the discursive social practices of empathy, and the specialized professional/rhetorical language that best facilitates expression/description of empathy. Here, I propose a broader approach based on empathy’s generic recurrence in both private and public practice. In “Genre as Social Action” (1984) Carolyn Miller “[examines] the connection between genre and recurrent situation and the way in which genre can be said to represent typified rhetorical action” (pg. 151), and much of what Miller sets out to clarify about the relationship between genre:rhetoric in her article echoes the empathy:rhetoric paradigm, thus providing a useful platform for this discussion. Though Miller’s analysis of genre is ultimately a bit more dependent upon hierarchy than I find specifically useful here (though not at all irrelevant), it is her ethnomethodological approach to genre—“seeking to explicate the knowledge that practice creates”—that lends itself best to empathy studies. Empathy, at its core,
is practice1, and these practices comprise a collective set of rhetorical situations and rhetorical language. Miller continues: “What is particularly important about rhetorical situations for a theory of genres is that they recur … but in order to understand recurrence, it is necessary to reject the materialist tendencies in situational theory. […] Recurrence is an intersubjective phenomenon, a social occurrence, and cannot be understood on materialist terms” (pg. 156). This attention to intersubjectivity as genre-building is an important aspect if we are going to understand empathy as a genre-construct because the subjectivity/objectivity/intersubjectivity divide is a destabilizing point of conflict in empathy studies, at large. If rhetoric is to bring any generic unity to cross-disciplinary empathy studies at all, there must be some understanding of how empathy is practiced in this regard across contextual barriers. Unfortunately, one resistance to handling empathy as genre might be that empathy is not typically as tightly restrained by context—and rhetorical situation—as might be convenient for traditional analysis; however, I would urge a broad, “liquid,” (Burke, Permanence and Change, 1965 qtd. in Miller, 1984, pg. 158) definition of rhetorical situation to help us deal with empathy as rhetorical genre. Here, I draw attention to the Burkean notion of “marked instability” that Miller, herself, calls into play as a means of expanding the application of genre as social action (pg. 158). Empathy, too, requires an adaptable, evolving social framework if any meaningful understanding of form or function is to exist, particularly because empathy as genre is often concerned with the necessarily (trans/inter)positional, though these social categories are not always neatly defined. When Miller revisits her 1984 article again ten years later in “Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre” (1994), she immediately points out the “problematic relationship between action and structure that … has engaged many others in a variety of disciplines” and asserts that we should begin looking to “ethnocategories” of genre to help solve this problem. She amends her original definition of genre, making it more expansive and inclusive, saying, “Genre … is capable of reproduction, [it] can be manifested in more than one situation, more than one concrete space-time,” calling it 1 Throughout the course of this discussion, “practice” as applied to empathy will take several forms, but for ease of initial application in theory here, consider practice/practitioner=use/user.
a “mid-level structurational nexus between mind and society.” Interestingly, Miller includes empathy, specifically, as part of this interlocutory and “necessarily relational” rhetorical structure. She and Thomas Farrell (1991) include empathy as part of “[excellent] rhetorical practice” (pg. 61). Empathy is generic, though I would like to depart from Miller’s structured language and suggest that empathy is a distinctly “rhizomatic” (Prior, 2009) genre (if it is capable of structure at all) embedded in all cognitive and emotive social action, though we struggle with the language to define it within this theoretical framework. Empathy: Thinking vs. Feeling Defining empathy tends to be part science, part art. In The Empathy Exams (2014), a narrative collection of well-researched, creative non-fiction, intersubjective stories written from the medical-actor perspective, Leslie Jamison gives us a modern, cohesive, science-as-art collection, through which her narratives almost transubstantiate a definition of empathy. Occasionally, her style assumes a more direct voice: Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see…. (pg. 5). Jamison’s summary here provides a graceful amalgamation of an empirical, literary, and personal (interdisciplinary) “state of empathy” and, thus, provides a useful starting point to begin discussing empathy’s rhetorical history, present, and prospective future. Jamison book, like many who currently explore empathy, delves naturally into the sciences because it is difficult to come to an understanding of the term (rhetorical or otherwise) without at least being aware of the way “empathy” has been shaped by science. For purposes of clarity, I would like to offer a brief crossdisciplinary lexicography here, for context: 1) Cognitive Empathy (Eslinger, 1998), (knowing a person’s internal state) 2) Neural Empathy/Mimicry-Action Model (Preston and de Waal, 2002)
3) Projective Empathy (Darwall, 1998)/Perspective Taking (Piaget, 1953) 4) Imagine Other (Batson 1991)/Perspective Taking (Ickes, 2009) 5) Affective Empathy (Zahn-Waxler, Robinson, & Emde, 1992), (feeling as another person feels) 6) “Sympathy” (Preston and de Waal, 2002), (feeling in response to suffering) 7) “Personal suffering” (Batson, 1991), (feeling distress in the presence of another person’s suffering) 8)Intuiting/Situational Projecting/ Einfühlung (Lipps, 1903) This list reflects a definitive split in the way our understanding of empathy has evolved in many ways, but the most distinct divide might be the rift between “cognitive” and “affective” empathy: thinking vs. feeling. The social and neurosciences tend to focus on creating language that helps develop our understanding of cognitive empathy, often describing feeling as an enrolled biological function. For this reason, definitions 1-4 on the previous list might seem to defy any historical relationship that the humanities (and a humanistic approach) would have with the term, though this modern appearance is somewhat deceptive. However, the need for a more global conceptualization of empathy—in text and practice, for professional and nonprofessional—is a shared concern for many who find themselves needing to “talk empathy” in any meta-descriptive way. The oft-cited social neuroscientists Jean Decety and William Ickes (whose 2009, 2011 reprint compilation The Social Neuroscience of Empathy provides an accessible, and rather comprehensive overview the collected research in their field has contributed to the definitions above) acknowledge in their “Introduction” the need for “a more theoretically coherent articulation of this important construct.” Furthermore—imperative to understanding the rhetorical call to take up empathy’s definitive and generic goals—Decety and Ickes state in the foreground: Given the long evolutionary history of the capacity for empathy, there is some irony in the fact that the word empathy has a relatively short history, being not much more than a hundred years old…. Not only is empathy a rather recent construct, but it is a complicated one that, from its very introduction, has been used by different writers in different ways. (pg. vii) The lexical “history” Decety and Ickes refers to reflects an unfortunately persistent dualism that pervades the way empathy is understood. If definitions 1-4 represent the sciences’ handling of the term in a cognitive, empirical way, then definitions 5-8 reflect
the affective, sympathetic, and sentimental components of empathy. This is the “empathy” that much of the masses know—sympathy, compassion. Historically, this is the empathy many synonymize with pathos and rhetoric. When it comes to empathy, however, superficial judgments are ill advised. Einfühlung and (Im)practical Aesthetics Perhaps not surprisingly, the terminological schismata of “empathy” begins in the rhetorical traditions of aesthetics, caught between the methodological goals of early 20th Century psychoanalysis and the traditions and trends of late 19 th Century romanticism and humanist psychology. This may explain the humanities’ rather confused tendency to be caught between “empathy in narrative” and “social cognitive empathy,” though both rely on rhetorical exchange. As Susan Lanzoni details in “Practicing Psychology in the Art Gallery: Vernon Lee’s Aesthetics of Empathy” (2009), the prevailing empathy theories dominating much of westernized psychology/psychoanalysis at the beginning of the 20th Century were theories of emotional aesthetics, and much of the prevailing separation between “thought” and “feeling,” observer-analyst and subject-patient that residually permeates empathy studies today can be traced back to the “mentalistic” aestheticism practiced during this time. In “Empathy Aesthetics: Experimenting Between Psychology and Poetry,” 2 Lanzoni further indicates that much of the current confusion about empathy in rhetorical studies took root in the situating of empathy as an aesthetic (anti)social process. If empathy is a genre at all, it is a social one, designed to facilitate understanding (and understanding of) how we are positioned socially: no clarity (or social good) has ever come of repressing this purpose. *** A Closer Look: Empathy, Power, and Social Change (Hitler and MLK)
2 Her contribution is included in Rethinking Empathy through Literature (2014), a cohesive collection that suggests both the complexity and potentiality of empathy as distinct literary-rhetorical genre, presenting it as “frustratingly ambiguous” (pg. 26). The work of Susanne Keene (mentioned later) can also be found in this collection.
In “The Rhetoric of Power: A Comparison of Hitler and Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Jill L. Robinson and Danielle Topping present a metric-based study in which they examine the way in which charismatic leaders employ power in language. Their two primary subjects—Hitler and MLK—are chosen for their rhetoric of charisma, power, and change. Charisma in rhetoric might not seem like the most likely rabbit to follow down the trail of understanding empathy as social genre. But what is charisma, exactly? According to Robinson and Topping (locating their work in rhetorical analysis dating back to the 1920s), “charismatic leaders possess an ability to transform their followers by appealing to their emotions [emphasis mine]”: “the situational factors that influence [charismatic leaders’] effectiveness” determine which type of emotive language would allow them to best manipulate the “complex relationship” they have with their followers (pg. 194). Unlike traditional rhetorical analysis, Robinson and Topping handle the language exchange between charismatic leaders and “followers” on an emotional and personal level—the classical rhetorical divide of “rhetor”/“audience” is too distant and too disparate to let us evaluate their speech accurately. Noting both physicality, “vocal variety,” and rhetorical language choice, Robinson and Topping make a strong case for considering emotive language as a metric for a “rhetoric of power” in both “toxic” and “ethical” leaders (pg. 195). One of the more unique results to emerge from Robinson and Topping’s study reveals how both Hitler and Martin Luther King, Jr. constructed language of “Affiliation”3 for their audience (pg. 202). The article says of MLK, “he articulated … an ‘indescribable capacity for empathy,” but it was both MLK and Hitler who brought this capacity into the rhetorical space to inspire social action, albeit in very different ways. MLK used a charismatic rhetoric of empathy to construct an “interpretation of reality” (pg. 196) that emphasized inclusive affiliation in/with American ideological identity and de-emphasized racial (aesthetic) conflict. Conversely, Hitler constructed “language of camaraderie to draw in his followers and to maintain distance from his enemies” (pg. 204). Hitler’s language drew distinct geopolitical borders that followed
3 This definition includes a subcategory of “Leveling, Collectives, minus Exclusion, Liberation, Diversity” (Robinson and Topping, 2013, pg. 209, Appendix C, Table C1).
the counterintuitive philosophy, “keep your friends close, but keep your enemies distant.” *** Any understanding of empathy must include its German heritage, philosophically and philologically. In 1902, einfühlung (“in(to) feeling”: German) became “empathy” (English) in what may have amounted to an attempt to reconcile similar concepts cross disciplinarily without appropriately representative vocabulary —a challenge that clearly remains today. Jørgen Hunsdahl’s “Concerning Einfühlung (Empathy): A Concept Analysis of its Origin and Early Development” (1967) provides a detailed overview of einfühlung as it became linguistically en vogue in German psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and aesthetic description near the turn of the century. In his discussion, Hunsdahl traces the development (and lack, thereof) of the German term, and acutely points out why much was lost in conceptual translation. The term was first employed by Robert Vischer in 1873 and was used to describe psychological and physiological activity, reactivity, and emotionality, though Vischer used the term rather amorphously. In 1903, Theodore Lipps began using the word einfühlung “as a scientific psychological term…. Before that time the philosophical and literary development of the concept was … supported by the romantic school in Germany” (pg. 181). He began creating a kind of “provisional definition” by which social scientists could begin to understand einfühlung (pg. 182). The problem with Lipps’ methodology was its arbitriness and incompleteness as he began conflagrating erlebnis (experience) with a more traditional employment of Asthetik, but this “aesthetic” was a muddled one, half rooted in Aristotelian classicism, half tied to romantic sentimentality. Because Lipps’ methodology was sanctioned and encouraged as sound psychoanalytical practice, einfühlung became a clinical practice, itself. The patient’s feelings became an object of study, quite separate from his/her psychologist: feelings were a bit like paintings or a book, but not quite a life, socially connected. Per Hunsdahl, “[Lipps] states that [einfühlung] can take place in our own consciousness only, and that the knowledge of this process is of essential importance for our understanding of any (aesthetical) experience” (pg. 182). Hunsdahl states that Lipps’
creation of this definition—his “division into form/contents”—“was taken over without criticism, for traditional reasons” (pg. 183). *** A Closer Look: Rom Harré4, Collectivity and Emotionological Practice In her explication of genre, Carolyn Miller (1994) calls upon the work of social psychologist Rom Harré to help clarify a persistent and plaguing problem that underlies the “system of commonality of which they are a constituent.” Miller writes: Of the many terms for collectivity—society, institution, culture, community—it is the last that has recently become an important and contested term in a variety of social disciplines. […] It was a powerful but hidden undercurrent in classical rhetoric, acquired prominence from the social constructionism of the early part of the twentieth century, but is still not well conceptualized, politically or rhetorically. It is a troublesome concept … that makes it difficult to account for change —vague, comforting, and sentimental. Miller voices frustration with this undefined notion of “community,” though she sees rhetorical social action as dependent upon it. Thus, she turns to Rom Harré, who helps facilitate her explication of community (and our understanding of rhetorical genre) by offering the concept of the “metaphysical status of collectives,” furthermore presenting collectivity as “taxonomic” and “relational” (Harré, 1981, qtd. in Miller, 1994). The important thing to note here is the “nexus between private and public” (Miller 1994), between linguistic and social, self and other. Harré’s body of work represents a distinct move toward hybrid psychology, the kind of work that continues to rely upon, define, and struggle with the limitations of his own rhetorical community—one that employs a rhetoric of empathy. Nowhere is this more evident than in Harré’s “Emotions as Cognitive-Affective-Somatic Hybrids” (2009). Here, Harré begins with a fundamental discussion of language, explaining that 4 Personal note: his work is truly interdisciplinary, from mathematics and physics to discursive cultural psychology, exploring (according to his academic profile) “assignments of meanings people actually use in managing their lives.” He spends his Spring semesters at Georgetown University, and I would like to arrange an interview for future research purposes.
the “the word ‘emotion’ as a noun is so replete with misleading implications, just from its grammatical role alone, that a case will emerge from the discussion of these vital human experiences, such as being angry, falling in love, being envious, and so on.” What follows is an advocacy for “local emotionology,” a plea for better language in representing/bridging the gap between what is essentially the “taxonomic” and “relational” identity-collective. For Harré, the language carrier/barrier best suited to deal with helping us understand how to represent how we understand cognitiveaffective-somatic experience (belonging) is emotion, and he present his argument for this most elegantly in his “Emotionology Principle”: “This principal asserts that we can discover what a particular emotion is by charting the conditions for the use of the relevant words” (pg. 294). Harré sees empathy as a cross-cultural “hinge” in the ethnomethodology of emotionology—“the roots of the knowledge we seem to have of other people…. In short, these practices are hinges” (pg. 298). Harré’s work concerning “Positioning Theory”—Consider: “Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves (1990); “Varieties of Positioning (1991); and “Positioning Theory” (2011)—provides promising, modern, and cohesive descriptive language to contribute to the global, theoretical goals of active empathy-for-change. “Positioning Theory” (2011), published in the collection The Encyclopedia of Peace Psychology, suggests we should understand each other’s social possibilities as a function of social position, an urge toward definitive empathy as a social act. *** This “tradition” (or “history” as Decety and Ickes, 2009, might prefer) of artificially dividing empathy is specific, with powerful rhetorical bias: Aristotle refers to “em-pathein” (“in passion/feeling”) in his speeches as “animation of the inanimate” (“Rhetoric”). By design, Aristotle embues empathy with two important qualities that affect the definition of einfühlung/empathy as it manifests itself in rhetorical terms: 1) he applies this term to psychological process, though he does not specify if the “animation” is internalized, externalized, either, or both; 2) he defines “em-pathien” as necessarily involving “the inanimate,” a term that reiterates itself to imply the aesthetic, but not the social. For Aristotle, “em-pathien” was a minor term, most likely emotional response to the aesthetic. (It should be noted that Aristotle’s definition of
“aesthetic” arguably included aspects that would align well with current and evolving definitions of “empathy”). When E.B. Tichener, a German-educated psychologist, deploys the first use of the English term “empathy,” the aesthetic influence is clear, defining it as, “the process of humanizing objects, of feeling ourselves or reading ourselves into them.” Unfortunately, many applied the term “objects” to people as well, to confusing and devastating effect. According to David Depew in “Empathy, Psychology, and Aesthetics: Reflections on a Repair Concept,” the German use of einfühlung, and the early, if troublesomely contradictory, equation of empathy=(empirical)aesthetics makes sense if placed in ideological context. Depew explains: The rise of a unified German state … required that key concepts … should be examined and justified objectively. If possible, this was to be done by experimentation, but failing that by rigorous, methodical introspection. […] At this time, German aesthetics took an empirical, even materialist turn. Empirical examination of the psychology of aesthetic response was widely cultivated, and it conferred great professional ethos on those psychologists who were taken to treat the subject insightfully. Eventually the concept of empathy became residual in aesthetics. […] If we ask why aesthetics turned away from empathy, it is tempting to see this as due, among other things, to the modern ist artistic movements that prized as artistic effects alienation and defamiliarization rather than identification. (pgs. 99-100) 5 Given the inherent “feeling” real empathy requires (even cognitive empathy), one might imagine that in its inception, einfühlung/empathy should have become a more holistically representative term. But Fritz W. Kramer’s “Empathy: Reflections on the History of Ethnology in Pre-Fascist Germany: Herder, Creuzer, Bastian, Bachofen, and Frobenius” (1985) provides ethnological (and rather dark) insight into why 5 The tension between the aesthetic/depersonalized and the social/personal is further described by Mikhail Bakhtin, who says that others can only “aestheticize” our personality post-mortem.
“empathy” may have been “reduced,” both in form and function. Kramer explains how “empathy” (as a developmental concept and a still-forming word) in pre-Fascist Germany depended, in social context, on recognizing cultural differences—aesthetic differences—and how this served a very specific purpose, ideologically and socially in Germany (one that would later strongly influence both the sciences’ and the arts’ fragmented view of empathy). Kramer explains how empathy studies has always been tied in some way to ethnology, so its terminological integrity largely depended on the ethos embraced by the empathy researchers responsible for its lexical and social value. Since the cultural values of pre-Fascist Germany (and much of the Western world) reflected a shift toward systematized racism, nationalism, and dehumanizing levels of insider/outsider value judgments, empathy became was reduced to its cognitive values, only. When a cultural definition of empathy not only allows aesthetic judgment of “others” but requires it, then this reframes the way in which groups are able to “feel” (or not) for people with whom they do not or cannot identify. It would be easy to say that in pre-Fascist Germany, empathy was not empathetic, giving way to culturally aesthetic concerns that were nothing short of xenophobia. On an ethical level, this is true. But there is much in the modern structuralization of empathy—including its persistently contradictory ties to aesthetic value judgments and ethno-psychology that have severely complicated its current theoretical status. Narrative Empathy: Bakhtin (Briefly), Oprah Book Clubs, and Unpleasurable Pedagogies Mikhail Bakhtin was no proponent of purely aestheticized empathy, culture, or text. In “Discourse in the Novel” (1938), Mikhail Bakhtin writes: Discourse lives … beyond itself, in a living impulse…, toward the object; if we detach ourselves completely from this impulse, all we have left is the naked corpse of the word from which we can learn nothing at all about the social situation or the fate of a given word in life. To study the word as such, ignoring the impulse that reaches out beyond it, is just as senseless as to study psychological experience outside the context of
that real life toward which it was directed and by which it is determined [Emphasis Bakhtin]” (pg. 292). The relationship between the word and the social, the collective and the individual—or “address,” per Bakhtin (qtd. in Wyman, 2008)—has always been marked by the desire and the struggle to find representative understanding. In empathy studies and intercultural communication, the terms “dialogism” and “intersubjectivity” are often pulled out of the Bakhtinian medical kit as the theoretical balm for what ails us communicatively. But in his early writing, Bakhtin sets forth “active empathy” (Creation of a Prosaics, 1990) as a direct foundation for future concepts. For Bakhtin, empathy (vzhivanie) depends as much on not knowing as knowing—it depends on coconstruction of knowledge, and it is decidedly accommodating to change in response to others’ lives. I believe it is much easier to understand, apply, and expand many of Bakhtin’s malleable concepts—including “genre,” as mentioned in “Discourse in the Novel”—if we set them on a precept of active empathy. In her article, “Bakhtin and Scheler: Toward a Theory of Active Understanding,” Alina Wyman looks at Bakhtin’s “active empathy,” and contextualizes it within the framework of Max Scheler’s “Mitgefühl” (co-feeling/feeling with). The problem with einfühlung as a philosophy, a psychology, and a generic way of approaching language was that it sought to representatively (aesthetically) “read” people like texts, assuming more could be known, judged, and evaluated than was ethically or logically possible. In its worst representation, this has led to nothing less than global aesthetic/cognitive judgments of entire peoples, cultures, language systems when einfühlung was practiced so distortedly.6 As Wyman points out, mitgefühl/“active empathy,” with its dialogical symmetry and “unsentimental” approach to “interpersonal communication,” provides structure with which to approach “the pressing ethical questions of modernity” (pg. 58). 6 If not outright genocide. Though it is outside the scope of this discussion to fully evaluate it here, there is a large body of knowledge concerning the “psychology of evil” that evaluates directive empathy in Nazi propaganda and rhetoric, though this is an area that could benefit from more exculpatory evaluation. I also think the work of Phillip Zimbardo and Steven Pinker help provide a useful framework for discussing how empathy (co-feeling) is a manipulated act (but not simply a pro-social, altruistic act, and to reduce it to such is socially dangerous).
These questions belong to all of us, ever more so as we find ourselves learning more but knowing less in the midst of a global conversation defined by change. In her scathing criticism of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Theresa Kulbaga presents a powerful argument for a rhetoric of empathy, but she very specifically requires that this rhetoric attend itself with comprehensive education of the situated social experience. Kulbaga handles empathy as distinct genre, saying, “to understand it as rhetorical is to invoke Kenneth Burke’s concept of identification…. Rhetorically, the invitation to empathize with another is persuasive to the extent that it appeals to the reader’s simultaneous investment in identification and difference” (pg. 508). This desire to identify can be problematic, however, as it can produce a generic form of empathy not well understood outside of the practicing context: when this generic empathy is exported in text and packaged with the message that the culture can be aesthetically “read,” the empathic “experience” becomes reductivist. On these grounds, Kulbaga takes issue with Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and it’s subsequent uptake as an American staple of Oprah Book Clubs, rejecting what she sees as Nafisi’s oversimplified claims about “narrative empathy.” Nafisi claims that “no amount of political correctness can make us empathize” but “the magic of imagination” can: for her, “empathy lies at the heart of the novel”(pg. 507). Kulbaga finds this brand of “imagination” little more than a shallow aesthetic judgment, and she sees it as feeding “self-representation” rather than true intersubjective and transculturally representative empathy. Complicating the problem Kulbaga has with this form of “narrative empathy” is the Oprah Book Club culture that attended this novel’s debut. In what Kulbaga terms “pleasurable pedagogy,” she condemns narrative (false) empathy and the belief that we could learn anything existentially meaningful simply by reading ourselves into the lives of “others.” In other words: we cannot know the other through textual-aesthetic experience alone. We need to understand our limits. The argument could simply be made that “narrative empathy” is “empathy as genre,” despite any contentions any may have with its constraints; however, as many practitioners of empathy studies contend, this is a very narrow definition of empathy as rhetorical genre. And “narrative empathy” isn’t an entirely clear concept, anyway. In her highly influential Empathy and the Novel (2007), Susanne Keen provides a
thorough analysis of narrative empathy through an interdisciplinary lens, pulling together research from the neurosciences to pedagogical studies, anthropology to literary criticism, to ask the question: Does reading make us empathetic? Her short answer is: not necessarily. Not in the same way that the social act of empathizing measurably develops empathy. Part of the problem for Keen is that reading may only “reflect the aesthetic preferences” (pg. 3) and “freedom from obligation” to act empathetically/sympathetically in response to a text can open up the possibility for highly unpredictable reactions to one’s genuine empathic response. Keen ultimately assesses the narrative empathy from a hypothetical standpoint, suggesting that we might learn to “enhance the potential” to respond empathically if we read narrative fiction. However, her commentary on interdisciplinary study, particularly after such thorough engagement herself, provides strong guidance, particularly as it applies to the literary and social sciences: “Developing the conversation between literature and psychology ought to benefit both disciplines. […] Literature professionals like myself may begin by respectfully comprehending psychology’s methodologies” (pgs. 12-13). Empathy: “Its Blocking and Its Facilitation” “Their pain is real…. They just articulated it wrong.” (West qtd. in Lynch, 1998 pg. 18). In The Body in Pain (1985), Elaine Scarry argues that physical pain “unmakes” our ability to articulate what we feel. Frankly, she may be right. Often, though, empathy begs us to value the inarticulable; enter the amorphous space of each other’s pain; acknowledge what we find as real; and reciprocate (validate!), but not necessarily make sense of each other’s rhetorical position. The classic divide in empathy studies of thinking vs. feeling might be better represented as a longstanding attempt to reconcile the articulable/logical and the unarticulable/physical/bodily. Indeed, the experiential, emotional, cultural, feeling, living self tries to cross a bridge of empathy that often make words seem like unsufficient materials. They often are. Which is why many believe empathy is best facilitated when physicality—the body, sense, feeling—is placed at the center of our attempt to understand one another,
rhetorically. Or, when we do not cross the divide, but become comfortable with space, reaching carefully. In “Rhetorics of Proximity: Empathy in Temple Grandin and Cornel West” (1998), Dennis A. Lynch begins with a much-needed defense of empathy, outright, stating, “Empathy used to be at the center, at the heart, of rhetorical studies. […] Empathy is both an attitude and a practice: it attunes our minds to the needs of others; it permits people who are arguing to discover, not just premises, but premises that work…. (pg. 5). Like Carolyn Miller, Lynch calls on Thomas Farrell, who handles empathy in his “Norms of Rhetorical Culture” (1993) as “awareness of the other,” a concept that operates as a centralized rhetorical activity. For Lynch, however, empathy has not received adequate attention, having been “summarily dismissed” by poststructuralists, postcolonialists, and postmodernists because empathy, among other reasons, appears deceptively “harmless” or “weak.” What Lynch most directly points out is that empathy places equal emphasis on listening, speaking, and feeling—what Burke refers to as “conditions of identification or consubstantiality” (qtd. in Lynch, pg. 6)—and this requirement to not simply dominate via rhetorical speech, but to engage in the “tension” of argument is not an altogether comfortable process for many modern rhetoricians. Lynch has little compassion for rhetoricians who would dispense with empathy in rhetoric7: “Without a vested interest in what really matters to other people … the whole idea of arguing with others dissolves, and what we have been calling ‘argument’ suddenly becomes something else altogether. *** A Closer Look: Nathaniel Teich, Rogerian Empathy, and Construction of Generic Perhaps no one has explored the gap between “rhetoric” and “empathy” more than Nathaniel Teich, using Rogerian rhetoric as his vessel of delivery. To use the words of Dennis A. Lynch, Teich treats empathy and Rogerian rhetoric as somewhat of a “master concept of rhetoric” (1998, pg. 7). In his edited collection, Rogerian Perspectives: Collaborative Rhetoric for Oral and Written Communication (1992), 7 And so do I.
Teich uses Rogers’ foundations of “congruence,” “unconditional positive regard,” and “empathic understanding” to explicate a way in which we might apply Rogerian rhetoric to “a broad range of intersubjective activities of communication.” Specific to artifactual productions of generic content, Teich has the following to say about how we might reconsider empathy’s role as a generic practice: Rogerian collaborative rhetoric applies to a broader range of oral and written communication than generally acknowledged. According to rhetoricians early view of Rogers, his ideas were limited to argumentation. In this context, critics objected to the adaptations of such ideas as “active listening,” “saying back,” and empathy from oral dialogue to written texts. For example, assuming that the putative audience … were distant and silent (unable to respond immediately, if at all), individual writers and their audiences could not engage in the interpersonal give-and-take necessary to work out resolutions acceptable to those with differing positions. Now, however, [we know] for many rhetorical situations, Rogerian principals offer initial guidance for one to engage in dialogue both internally (as self-generating interior conversation) and externally in actual discourse… as a social act. (pg. 4) *** As Lynch’s article progresses, empathy’s dichotomous historical roots in psychology/psychoanalysis create a unique opportunity in how the author is able to handle his subject(s). Lynch embeds his advocacy for empathy as a rhetorical “practice” in Rogerian rhetoric. In “Communication: Its Blocking and Its Facilitation” (1951, Reprinted in Teich, 1992), Rogers sums up his general philosophy about communication and empathy: “Real communication occurs … when we listen with understanding.” As Lynch points out, Carl Rogers’ work as a humanistic psychologist might run the risk of being accused of being rhetorically patronizing or complicit (if not obliviously clinical8, given its doctor-patient/subject-object structure): for some 8 Take, for example: Mcleod, J. (1999). A narrative social constructionist approach to therapeutic empathy. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 12(4), 377. Included in the
“active listening” is too self-oriented, failing to “take stock of … social position and its effect on the matters at issue” (pg. 6). Lynch, disagrees, however, asserting that these criticisms should only help us understand the value of empathy in rhetoric, not turn away from it. Particularly where Rogerian rhetoric is concerned, his belief is that it should be applied in practice because it is “rhetorically productive.” It is productive not as a method for winning argument, but to discover how to rhetorically develop the tools for struggle “within complicated social dynamics” (pg. 20). To this point, Lynch presents a rhetoric of empathy as a “rhetoric of proximity,” embodied: “wanting to move closer … [understanding] that the space between us cannot be overcome” (pg. 14). Lynch gives us Temple Grandin and Cornel West to consider. Grandin’s life, as written about in Thinking in Pictures: and Other Reports from my Life with Autism (1995, 2009) allows us to consider the convergence of several themes—body, language, understanding, and empathy. Lynch writes, “Grandin … makes her readers aware that during her life others have wanted to speak for her, to ‘take care of her’ without consulting her but by assuming that they know her because they know her ‘condition.’ She makes it clear from the start of the book that her main ‘opposition’ are professionals—psychologists, social workers, and educational specialists…” (pg. 12). But Lynch believes that by keeping the body at the center of the rhetorical conceptualization of what empathy is—“The body, her specific body, does not ever leave the stage of the book, rhetorically or argumentatively” (pg. 13)—a space is maintained, not for “feeling into” but “feeling with,” for accepting our limits, and accepting her autonomy. As Lynch writes, with respect: What Grandin teaches us, then, is the necessity of—and how to find understanding within—rhetorical disappointment. […] She wants us to become more familiar with … irreducible complexity, and with the simple act of refusal, with a “no” that does not have to end interaction forever but that admits that no one
annotated bibliography of this review, this article provides a good example of Rogerian rhetoric applied in clinical, therapeutic practice.
understands exactly what is happening in every situation and that no one needs to assert authority in every situation” (pg. 14) Afterthoughts: Looking Forward There are many offshoots of “generic empathy” not covered here. For example, “Legal Storytelling” presents a unique study of victim impact statements. Pedagogical empathy presents its own subset of curricular considerations. And some of the more capable advocates for rhetorical-empathy studies may be neurorhetoricians: As Jordynn Jack says in the “Introduction to Neurorhetorics, Drawing on the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of rhetorical study, neurorhetorics would question how discourses about the brain construct neurological difference, determine how to operationalize rhetorical inquiry into neuroscience in meaningful ways, and study what those constructions imply for contemporary public discourse. (pg. 2) As much promise as I see in a statement like this (and there is much), I hope we maintain space—space for not naming, space for difference and change, and space for not knowing. Empathy is a genre, its exigency made possible by our very inclusion in the human collective. We have as much to learn about empathy as a social act from the girl talking to herself on the train or the patient sitting, scared, in the doctor’s office as we do from the behavioral psychologist or the trained rhetorician. Leslie Jamison writes, “I want our hearts to be open” (pg. 218). I agree. I’d like for us to keep our minds open, too.
Bibliography9 Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). Discourse in the novel. The dialogic imagination. (C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Trans). Austin: UT Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1990). Creation of a prosaics. (G.S. Morson and C. Emerson, Trans). Stanford: Stanford Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1993). Toward a philosophy of the act. (V. Liapunov, Trans.). Austin: UT Press. Batson, C. D. (1991). The altruism question: Toward a social-psychological answer. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 5 September 2014. Darwall, S. (1998). Empathy, sympathy, care. Philosophical Studies, 89, 261– 282. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/829708368?accountid=14541 Davies, B. and Harré, R. (1990). Positioning: The discursive production of selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 20: 43–63. Depew, D. (2005). Empathy, psychology, and aesthetics: Reflections on a repair concept. Poroi, 4(1), 6. Eslinger, P. J. (1998). Neurological and neuropsychological bases of empathy. European Neurology,1998,193–199.Retrievedfrom http://search.proquest.com/docview/884468368?accountid=14541 Farrell,T.B. (1993). Norms of rhetorical culture. New Haven:Yale U P. Grandin, T. (2009). Thinking in pictures. Bloomsbury Publishing. Harré, R. (2011). Positioning Theory. The Encyclopedia of Peace Psychology. Harré, R. and Langenhove, L. V. (1991), Varieties of positioning. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 21: 393–407. Jack, J. (Ed.). (2013). Neurorhetorics. New York: Routledge. Keen, S. (2007). Empathy and the novel. Cary, NC, USA: Oxford University Press. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 8 September 2014.
9 Annotated Bibliography for Selected Sources Appended
Kramer, F. W. (1985). Empathy—Reflections on the History of Ethnology in Pre-Fascist Germany:
Herder,
Creuzer,
Bastian,
Bachofen,
and
Frobenius.
Dialectical
Anthropology, 9(1), 337-347. Lanzoni, S. (2009). Practicing psychology in the art gallery: Vernon Lee's aesthetics of empathy. J. Hist. Behav. Sci., 45: 330–354. Lanzoni, S. (2014). Empathy aesthetics. Rethinking Empathy Through Literature, 34. Lipps, T. (1903). Einfühlung, inner Nachahmung, und Organ-empfindungen. Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie, 1, 185– 204. Lynch, D.A. (1998) “Rhetorics of proximity: Empathy in Temple Grandin and Cornell West.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Winter, 1998), pp. 5-23 Mcleod, J. (1999). A narrative social constructionist approach to therapeutic empathy. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 12(4), 377. Obama, Barack. "Pres. Barack Obama: Literacy and Empathy." YouTube. YouTube, 27 July 2007. Web. 01 Oct. 2014. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGHbbJ5xz3g> Piaget, J. (1953). The origins of intelligence in the child. New York: International UP. Preston, S. D., and de Waal, F. B. M. (2002). Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25, 1– 72. Prior, P. (2009). From speech genres to mediated multimodal genre systems: Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and the question of writing. Bazerman et al, 17-34. “Rhetoric 1411 b 32”. W.D. Ross (ed.), The works of Aristotle, translated into English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930. Robinson, J., & Topping, D. (2013). The rhetoric of power. Journal of Management Inquiry, 22(2), 194-210. Scarry, E. (1985). The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. Oxford U P. Wyman, A. (2008). Bakhtin and Scheler: Toward a Theory of Active Understanding. Slavonic and East European Review, 58-89.
Zahn-Waxler, C., Robinson, J. L., and Emde, R. N. (1992). The development of empathy in twins. Developmental Psychology, 28, 1038–1047.
Annotated Bibliography Depew, David. "Empathy, Psychology, and Aesthetics: Reflections on a Repair Concept." Poroi 4, Iss. 1 (2005): p. 99-107. Depew examines einfühlung/empathy’s conceptual evolution (as a rhetorical and socio-psychological construct) through its cultural relationship with aesthetics. Depew begins his analysis with a discussion of German empiricism, explaining how an ethos of psychological evaluation via aesthetic response initially meant empathy garnered a definition of depersonalized aesthetic experience (feeling toward an object-other) in evaluative practice. Depew explains how aesthetics—as a classical, philosophical value and a generic nationalist concept—influenced the cultivation of empathy, per definition, as it took root in a German state rapidly developing and applying psychoanalytic and psychosocial theory. Depew points out that empathy’s initial tie to aesthetics weakened as German (Western) cultural values turned away from Romanticism’s sentimentalities (thereby abandoning empathy’s remaining
emphasis on “feeling) and moved toward Modernism (with its emphasis on aesthetic isolationism and depersonalization). This “reflection” draws helpful and clear connections between empathy and aesthetics (as value systems), providing a background analysis for the thought/feeling divide pervasive in empathy studies today. Harré, R. (2009). ““Emotions as Cognitive-Affective-Somatic Hybrids.” Emotion Review October 2009 vol. 1 no. 4 294-301. In this vocabulary analysis of emotion, Harré present “The Emotionology Principle”: the idea that “we can discover what a particular emotion is by charting the conditions for the use of the relevant words” (pg. 294). Harré presents this principle as a function of social and physiological condition and context in context. This article begins by presenting “emotion” as a complex grammatical structure “replete with misleading implications” since emotion (noun) scarcely captures the nuanced state of doing or being that more expressly allows for discussion of emotivity. Harré’s concern is one of accurately matching global emotive language/experience with local emotive language/experience. Using Wittgenstein to help shape his claim, he recommends that we consider the possibility of understanding emotion’s social function/production through the lens of “language games” as “practice— activites in which people are engaged as players. Language games are what people do” (pg. 297). By presenting emotion as something somebody does and defines through language (empowered) rather than something that happens to them (disempowered and disempowering), Harré suggests we should work on cultivating a better vocabulary for emotional description based on personal and social experience. Furthermore, he claims that we do not need to emotively or cognitively learn “empathies and sympathies” in experiential practice, but we do need to learn the “emotionology” appropriate to their description. Harré ends his discussion of language and emotion by stating: “The scientific study of emotions needs physiology, ethology, grammar, and anthropology to do a ‘proper job’” (pg. 300). Hunsdahl, J. B. (1967), Concerning Einfühlung (empathy): A concept analysis of its origin and early development. J. Hist. Behav. Sci., 3: 180–191. Hunsdahl’s concise article presents a historical analysis of the conceptual and etymological emergence of “einfühlung”(empathy) as it evolved in Germany and early America. Hunsdahl confines his focus to the word’s development as it grew out of late 19th century German Romanticism and took root in psychoanalytic theory and methodologized clinical practice. The article explicates the major contributors to einfühlung’s conceptual development, with Hunsdahl paying particular attention to Lipps articulation of the term. This article provides a firm sociolinguistic/historical analysis of einfühlung, allowing for a better terminological and rhetorical understanding of “empathy” in American/English context.
Ickes, W., and Decety, J. (2009). The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. As this collection of essays indicates in its introductive title, it seeks to “understand the minds (and brains) of people who are seeking to understand other people’s minds”: however, as Decety and Ickes (Eds.) make clear in this collection and in their related and representative research, the “people” in question are not limited to the scientific community, only, but the expansive popular community who have contributed to our understanding of empathy and its complexity. This collection begins by examining the question, 1) “What is Empathy?” allowing the pre-eminent social neuroscientist, Daniel Batson to present an open-ended question to this phenomenological question. The collection continues with a segmented discussion of 2)Social, Cognitive, and Developmental Perspectives on Empathy; 3) Clinical Perspectives on Empathy; and 4) Evolutionary and Neuroscience Perspectives on Empathy. This collection provides a valuable cross section of applied and theoretical research with equal attention paid to the cognitive and affective components of empathy. This compilation should be evaluated as a literature review with its major strength being the established research of its contributors and the relevantly comprehensive bibliographies provided with each entry. This should be considered required reading for any student of empathy studies in any field. Jamison, L. (2014) The empathy exams. Minneapolis: Graywolf. Using Jamison’s experience as a medical actor as its leitmotif, this collection of researched non-fiction essays explores empathy by presenting the stories of Jamison’s subjects. Part art, part science, this collection examines both the cognitive and affective forms of empathy, but Jamison’s discussion ultimately focuses on the intangible and textually difficult-to-represent. Using her own personal experience with abortion and a heart defect as a metaphorical access point to discussing how the clinicalization of thought and feeling, senses and emotions can lead to problematic silences, misrepresentations, and misunderstandings in empathetic expression/exchange, Jamison’s essays provide a uniquely human (and modernly cohesive) approach to “empathy in text.” Keen, S. (2007). Empathy and the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press. Drawing from expansive research in cognitive psychology, the social and neurosciences, and sociocultural and pedagogical theory, Keen’s book reexamines literary or “narrative empathy” through an interdisciplinary lens. By positing the social, experiential empathy humans feel in the presence of humanhuman interaction against the sympathetic feelings reportedly elicited and encouraged by narrative and character identification, Keen attempts to formulate a more nuanced theory of literature’s effect on reader empathy
(building and response). Keen’s book is a useful text in the study of rhetorical/textual empathy because it uses cross-disciplinary knowledge to call into question many of the longstanding assumptions about the powers and limitations of literature and empathy. Handling both empathy and text (language) as equally emotive and cognitive productions, Keen’s book examines the implicative potential of reading as an empathy-building activity, but her extensive examination ultimately refuses to provide a definitive link between “Empathy” and “the Novel.” Kramer, F. W. (1985). Empathy—Reflections on the History of Ethnology in Pre-Fascist Germany: Herder, Creuzer, Bastian, Bachofen, and Frobenius. Dialectical Anthropology, 9(1), 337-347. Kramer’s article evaluates einfühlung/empathy as a methodology by placing it the context of pre-Fascist German ethnology. The author examines the cultural production and employment of empathy (conceptually) as it is developed through the ethnomethodological practices of Germany’s most influential early 20th Century anthropologists. Kramer presents empathy as a methodological genre, defined specifically (though disparately) through ethnological datagathering practice. Aesthetic judgments about self and other combined with a strongly embedded sense of prescribed nationalism meant that empathy as a methodology became an aesthetic evaluation of cultural sameness versus difference. This article provides a unique view of empathy as methodology, enriching its generic potential and providing its historic employment as a method/practice. Kulbaga, T. A. (2008). “Pleasurable pedagogies: Reading lolita in tehran and the rhetoric of empathy.” College English, 506-521. In her examination of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Kulbaga’s article examines the book’s “rhetorical convergences—including diverse nationalisms, neoliberalisms, imperialisms and feminism” (pg. 507). Kulbaga argues that Nafisi presents empathy as a commodified, transnational feminist value, appealing to the pop-pedagogical values of “American Oprah culture,” thereby obscuring cross-cultural geopolitical realities. For Kulbaga, self-identifying, “pleasurable pedagogy” (literature that pleases a socially and economically privileged reader by commodifying “life changing” sympathy for a cultural “other”) is problematic from a transnational/transcultural standpoint because it can obscure systematic asymmetries and block possible routes for creating discursive empathetic rhetoric. This article argues that this novel’s popularity (and pop-empathy) is largely a product of both the self-oriented sympathies of American book club culture and otherizing post-9/11 geopolitics; however, its rhetorical value is problematized by its construction of empathy through the aesthetic lens of westernized feminism. This discussion makes a valuable contribution to empathy in rhetorically inclusive feminist dialogisms. *Kulbaga’s article received polarized critical response. Lynch, D.A. (1998) “Rhetorics of Proximity: Empathy in Temple Grandin and Cornell
West.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Winter, 1998), pp. 5-23 Using Temple Grandin and Cornel West to help build his case, Lynch argues for a recentralizing of empathy as a core concept in rhetorical practice. Empathy, he says, is best made possible (implicatively in text) when bodies are centralized and the physicalities of experience—even if not easily articulable-are presented at the forefront of the rhetorical exchange. Lynch suggests that learning to empathize—particularly with “obstinate bodies”—forces readers/listeners to live with rhetorical disappointment, but it also creates opportunity to learn how to assume new rhetorical positions of possibility. According to Lynch, this struggle between limitation and possibility allows us to develop better rhetorical tools within a framework of resistance, teaching us how to “operate best, not in isolation, but when situated within complicated social dynamics” (pg. 20). Mcleod, J. (1999). A narrative social constructionist approach to therapeutic empathy. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 12(4), 377. Mcleod’s article presents a staged approach to utilizing narrative social constructionist empathy in talk therapy with emphasis on rearticulating traumatic memory structures. Mcleod uses the Barrett-Lennard (1981) cyclical model of empathy to provide a working structure for “re-authoring lifenarratives” through therapist-client co-constructed empathetic engagement. The author acknowledges the fragmentary and problematic definition of empathy, within the field of counseling and therapy and interdisciplinarily. This article is designed to contribute to building a more comprehensive and practical working definition of empathy, particularly in dialogic practice. Miller, C. R. (1994). Rhetorical community: The cultural basis of genre. Genre and the new rhetoric, 67-78. Revisiting concepts established in “Genre as Social Action” (1984), Miller clarifies the need to “look to ethnocategories of discourse rather than to the theoretically neat classifications” of genre. Miller situates her evaluation of genre within the framework of culture more specifically in this article. Miller draws attention to genre’s role in how we can “bridge the gap” between micro and macro structures and “understand the relationship between, on the one hand, the observable particular (peculiar) actions of individual agents and, on the other the abstract yet distinctive influence of a culture, a society, or an institution. Miller calls genre the “structurational nexus” between mind and society, pointing out that its very ability to facilitate between micro and macro levels, internal and external, might make it problematic: “To see genre in this way … suggests the specific contribution rhetoric makes to the problem in social theory (pg. 60). Miller continues to underline genre’s pragmatic purpose within communities, broadly defined: “Genres not only help real people in spatio-temporal communities do
their work and carry out their purposes; they also help virtual communities; the relationships we carry around in our heads, to reproduce and reconstruct themselves, to continue their stories” (pg. 64). Robinson, J., & Topping, D. (2013). The rhetoric of power. Journal of Management Inquiry, 22(2), 194-210. Analyzing charismatic speech, Robinson and Topping present their findings in a quantitative comparative rhetorical analysis of the rhetoric of power in the speeches of Hitler and Martin Luther King, Jr. Using three theoretical linguistic lenses designed to examine language of leadership, Robinson and Topping attempt to “cultivate theory development in the expression of leadership through language” (pg. 195) by examining measures of power orientation, delivery style, affiliation motives, changes in rhetoric over time, response to crisis, etc. Their coding protocol measured the following rhetoric measures: Power, Affiliation, Optimism, Commonality, Activity, “Additional variables.” The study does not attempt to present either MLK or Hitler as “more” or “less” charismatic/powerful, but it attempts to understand the mechanisms of and relationship between these variables. The theorists present several hypotheses about and their results (many of which overturn expected assumptions, such as why both leaders used a high degree of “Self-referential” language in nearly equal amount). Despite presenting a rather convincing argument for the relationship between charisma and power (and perhaps because the comparison between a “moral” and “toxic” leader produced as many questions as answers), the study concludes with a clear recommendation for follow-up research.