The Role of Empathy in Literary Reading: From Einfuhlung to the Neuroscience of Embodied Cognition, with the Example of Kafka's The Metamorphosis

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Hermann Lotze, Robert Vischer, and Theodor Lipps pioneered the notion of Einfuhlung, a term translated into the English empathy by Edward Titchener in 1911. This article investigates the role of empathy in literary reading by reconnecting it to its origins in the theories of Einfuhlung and by revisiting these theories in the light of neuropsychological studies of embodied cognition carried out since the nineties. Contemporary to the coinage of the term empathy and to the broader dissemination of the notion of Einfuhlung, Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915) is here used as a test terrain for the hypotheses generated by this investigation. Kafka's novella shows us how literature can use fantastic cognition (Kukkonen) to open a space of empathic indetermination in which the reader can resonate with structures of feeling extended beyond normal human sensorimotor forms.

Automated summary

This article explores the role of empathy in literary reading by examining its origins in the theories of Einfuhlung and revisiting these theories based on recent neuropsychological studies. Using Franz Kafka's novel "The Metamorphosis" as a case study, the article demonstrates how literature can create a space of empathic indetermination by employing fantastic cognition.