TY - JOUR
AU1 - Boler, Megan
AB -  Empathy is widely embraced as a means of educating the social imagination; from John Dewey to Martha Nussbaum, Cornel West to bell hooks, we find empathy advocated as the foundation for democracy and social change. In this article I examine how students' readings of Art Spiegelman's MAUS, a comicbook genre depiction of his father's survival of Nazi Germany, produces the Aristotelian version of empathy advocated by Nussbaum. This ‘passive empathy’, I argue, falls far short of assuring any basis for social change, and reinscribes a ‘consumptive’ mode of identification with the other. I invoke a ‘semiotics of empathy’, which emphasizes the power and social hierarchies which complicate the relationship between reader/listener and text/speaker. I argue that educators need to encourage what I shall define as ‘testimonial reading’ which requires the reader's responsibility. 
TI - The risks of empathy: Interrogating multiculturalism's gaze
JF - Cultural Studies
DO - 10.1080/09502389700490141
DA - 1997-05-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/taylor-francis/the-risks-of-empathy-interrogating-multiculturalism-apos-s-gaze-N5CfICu09I
SP - 253
EP - 273
VL - 11
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -