World Languages and Literatures

See the following reviews:
* In Consciousness, Literature and the Arts. Vol. 13.3 (December 2012). By Harry Youtt.
* In Language and Literature. Vol. 22.4 (2013). By Dan McIntyre.
* In Poetics Today. Vol. 34.4 (2013).
* In Style. Vol. 48.3 (Fall 2014). By Shang Biwu.

The connection between literature, empathy, and pro-social behavior is a very old one. In the classical world, the power of storytelling to move and change the behavior of audiences was already recognized, as illustrated by the commentaries of Plato and Aristotle on the effects of tragedy. Perhaps the best demonstrations of this relationship are the medieval exempla: stories of warning and guidance meant to provoke a reaction leading to reflection and behavioral change. Exempla revolve around a preceptive principle or "moral" that is brought to life by the vividness of the story told. By embodying in fictional characters the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors under scrutiny, exempla take the audiences from the abstract and general to the concrete and particular, making their lesson more tangible and, thus, were the preferred format for didactic literature. As such, they not only enjoyed great popularity during the Middle Ages but, centuries later, also constituted the perfect vehicle for enlightening projects such as Marfa de Zayas's gender activism in early modern Europe. Zayas, a central figure in Spain's literary golden age, modernizes the exempla genre by building a complex narrative structure that allows both for perspective taking and affective involvement. Such a structure aims to elicit in her readers an empathic response that in turn could lead to ethical reflection and social change. Centuries before the role of the sympathetic imagination in understanding others and the power of literature to change readers became important topics of discussion in philosophy, science, and literary studies, Zayas's collection of novels, which enjoyed a great success in Spain and Europe 3 and were only rivaled by Cervantes's Exemplary Novels in popularity,4 explored and illustrated the complexity of the narrativeempathy link.

B ookstores today are replete with publications on what to eat to feel good and how to prevent and fight cancer and other diseases with the help of superfoods such as broccoli or kale. 1 Food is a tool at our disposal, a tool to preserve and shape our bodies. 2 A remarkable example of how our societies view the connection between food and the shaping of an organism is the blog "Entremujeres" [Among Women] of Clarín, one of the main newspapers in Argentina, which provides future mothers with "tricks" to choose the sex of their babies, including dietetic recommendations such as eating legumes, cold meats, fish and fruits if they wish male offspring and dairy, chard, or oatmeal, if they desire a girl. According to the blog, their advice is based on biochemical studies carried out during the 1980s, which demonstrate that a high proportion of potassium and sodium in the diet along with a decrease in calcium and magnesium favor the sperm Y, while the opposite relationship favors the sperm X (Elustondo). Interestingly, Clarín's recommendations in the twenty-first century are not far from those that phy-1 It is important to note that, as Nina L. Etkin reminds us, "Until the recent and rapidly escalating interest in functional foods and supplements, since the 1980s … foods were regarded as virtually chemically inert, thus of no salience to disease processes" (3).

T he study of consciousness as understood and portrayed by early modern culture has flourished in the last few years thanks to the cognitive literary studies interface 1 (the interdisciplinary exploration of mind and fiction) and, particularly, its cognitive historicist strand (the consideration of the ideas about the mind that circulated in early modernity). Such an approach has proved very useful to examine how early modern subjects viewed the workings of the mind-what they called the anima (the soul)-and how those views were expressed through different discursive realms (e.g., medical, philosophical, fictional).

Unlike the rest of Europe, where fascism was defeated after World War II, Spain had to endure a long and repressive dictatorship (1939-1975). Justice was never served and, to this day, almost eighty years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, the memoria histórica movement to acknowledge Franco's genocide and compensate the families of his victims-many remain buried in unopened mass graves scattered around the country-faces continuing obstruction by Franco's sympathizers. The trauma and agony of the impotent families of these victims resurface through the narratives of memoria histórica (multimodal narratives commonly expressed via novels, plays, films, and soap operas, but also through administrative and popular media discourses in legal and human rights settings). My case study here will be the 2002 memoria histórica novel La voz dormida [The Sleeping Voice], by Dulce Chacón, with special attention to its 2011 film adaptation by Benito Zambrano. The Sleeping Voice narrative (as I refer to it hereafter), constructed across two different media, helps us to explore the dynamics between empathy and social awareness in the context of the current movement to recover historical memory in Spain. I focus particularly on the strategies that Chacón and Zambrano employ to engage audiences

Whether fictional narratives can make us more empathic has been widely discussed and is still a controversial topic. Can fiction help us feel the pain of others? Can it promote pro-social behavior to aid the victims of human rights abuse? The present essay explores these questions in connection to the cinema of memoria histórica [Spanish historical memory], born from the need to revisit the trauma of Spanish fascism, which originated in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War and terrorized Spaniards until the end of Franco’s dictatorship in 1975. The article introduces the notion of cinema of empathy: a type of cinema—often tied to a film genre that features human rights abuse as a central theme, such as the historical memory genre—featuring a high density of scenes of empathy. In these scenes, the human face, the eyes, and the energy created among human bodies are employed as a strategy to both portray and elicit resonance and enactment empathy—among characters and between the characters and the audience—potentially inducing a pro-social behavioral response in the audience, in connection to an ethical-socio-political problem presented in the film. A prototype of cinema of empathy within the memoria histórica genre is the film La voz dormida [The Sleeping Voice] (2011). This film is structured around the affective experience of the characters and features a high density of scenes of empathy centered on the human face and the eyes. However, more importantly, it focuses on the body and the affective energy created and communicated among bodies: bodies abused, bodies assembled in solidarity, bodies that show, hide, and leak their emotional interiority. The essay ends with a discussion of the potential effects of empathic cinematic strategies in the ideological context of contemporary Spain, as well as their potential benefits for the advancement of historical memory activism. Although a correlation between empathic intention, empathic filmic strategies, and empathic audience responses cannot be established and despite the lack of sufficient empirical studies on empathic response to film as well as on the empathy-altruism connection, a cinema of empathy as a distinct type of film currently exists and is practiced in connection to certain genres centered on human rights abuse, such as the memoria histórica genre. Insights from a diversity of disciplines in the humanities and the sciences (narrative and film studies, social neurosciences, sociology, history, etc.), efficiently channeled through the interface known as cognitive approaches, may provide the grounds for future empirical studies to help us corroborate, nuance, and/or reject our initial hypotheses on the power of fiction to elicit empathy and pro-social behavior.