Literary Einfühlung : A Reappraisal of German Theories of Empathy

Abstract: I propose to link some insights and findings of the German psychological aesthetics of the late nineteenth century to the neuroscience of empathy. My aim is to reconstruct a genealogy, or perhaps even an archeology, of literarische Einfühlung , emphasizing that the origins of the German debate on Einfühlung are not limited to visual, optical, and spatial concerns, but also encompass distinctly literary phenomena. In particular, I focus on one genre, tragedy, and two key categories, das Tragische and die Tragik . The latter term distinguishes the psychological interpretation of tragedy from the former metaphysical one and ultimately from philosophy.