Negative empathy in narrative: humanizing evil in In Cold Blood and Les bienveillantes

Abstract

Prompted by the critical void in affect theory about how literary affects are created, the present MA thesis aims to analyse the emotional response to negative empathy precisely as a literary narratological construction. To do so, drawing on L. Doležel’s conception of the theory of mimesis as a “possible-world semantics” and on the subsequent understanding of fictional narratives as “parasocial” worlds (Oatley), the main body of this MA thesis will consist on a narratological analysis of T. Capote’s In Cold Blood and J. Littell’s Les bienveillantes. This examination of both novels focuses on the literary devices ―which I have called “empathic builders” ― that promote an empathic engagement with negative characters. On the one hand, it reveals in-text negative empathy to be a formal phenomenon with a material dimension; on the other hand, it exemplifies the capacity of literary texts to enlarge the reader’s affective and empathic capacity