Synopses & Reviews
How much can we know about what other people are feeling and how much can we sympathize or empathize with them? The term "intimacy"which has always referred both to the inmost and personal, and to relationships of exceptional closenesscaptures a tension between a confidence in the possibility of shared experience and a competing belief that thoughts and feelings are irreducibly private. This book is an interdisciplinary study of shared feeling as imagined in eighteenth-century ethics, romantic literature, and twentieth-century psychoanalysis. Original interpretations of Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Austen show how aspirations toward mutual recognition give way to appreciation of varied, nonreciprocal forms of intimacy. The book concludes with accounts of empathy and unconscious communication in the psychoanalytic setting, revealing the persistence of romantic preoccupations in modernity. Yousef offers a compelling account of how philosophical confidence in fellow-feeling and sympathy is transformed by literary attention to uneven forms of emotional response, including gratitude, disappointment, distraction, and absorption. In its wide-ranging and eclectic engagement with current debates on the relationship between ethics, affect, and aesthetics, the book will be crucial reading for students of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, as well as for literary theorists.
Review
"Yousef's insistence on an irreducible solitude and the challenge it poses to an otherwise easy or instinctive or hard-wired ethics of identification, sympathy, and fellow-feeling is a powerful and timely salvo. The scholarship here is first-rate, the disciplinary reach extensive, and the writing and thinking superior."William Galperin, Rutgers University
Review
"Yousef is consistently brilliant in identifying and working through the countless shades and types of moral obligation, personal vulnerability, and communal justice manifested in eighteenth-century forms of intimacy and sympathy. Possessed of a remarkably fine ear, she succeeds in drawing out the psychological and interpersonal energies and valuations across a wide spectrum of sociable and intimate human engagement. This is a book of enormous riches."Thomas Pfau, Duke University
Review
"Those looking for a fresh perspective on late-18th- and early-19th-century culture will find a friend in Yousef. Yousef's book is a tour de force . . . Yousef seamlessly synthesizes complex human emotions, literary traditions, and figures; her discussion of 'the interpretation of silence' is fascinating. Summing Up: Essential."T. J. Haskell, CHOICE
Review
"Yousef grounds her intellectually exciting book in mid-century-philosophy, offering a careful analysis of eighteenth-century moral philosophers and an extended discussion of Rousseau's utopian literature, but then focuses the majority of the discussion on fiction and poetry from 17901820, with an extension in early twentieth-century psychoanalysis and contemporary performance art . . . Yousef makes a bold claim about Romantic-era literature's intervention in ideas about sympathy, offering the term 'intimacy' to describe and recover 'failures' of sympathy. The big ideas in this book promise to open into years of discussion."Elizabeth A. Dolan, European Romantic Review
Synopsis
This book explores the conceptual complexity and formal challenges posed by the concept of intimacy in eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
Synopsis
How much can we know about what other people are feeling and how much can we sympathize or empathize with them? The term -intimacy- captures a tension between a confidence in the possibility of shared experience and a competing belief that thoughts and feelings are irreducibly private. This book is an interdisciplinary study of shared feeling as imagined in eighteenth-century ethics, romantic literature, and twentieth-century psychoanalysis. Original interpretations of Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Austen show how mutual recognition gives way to the appreciation of varied, nonreciprocal forms of intimacy. The book concludes with accounts of empathy and unconscious communication in the psychoanalytic setting, revealing the persistence of romantic preoccupations in modernity. Yousef offers a compelling account of how philosophical confidence in sympathy is transformed by literary attention to uneven forms of emotional response, including gratitude, disappointment, distraction, and absorption. In its wide-ranging and eclectic engagement with current debates on the relationship between ethics, affect, and aesthetics, the book will be crucial reading for students of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, as well as for literary theorists.
About the Author
Nancy Yousef is Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York. She is the author of Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy in Enlightenment Philosophy and Romantic Literature (2004).