Refamiliarizing Empathy Through the Aesthetics of James Joyce and Agustín Yáñez

Abstract

In my dissertation, "Refamiliarizing Empathy through the Aesthetics of James Joyce and Agustín Yáñez," I perform a comparative study of aesthetic portrayals of empathy primarily through two representative novels of Latin-American and European modernism: Yáñez's Al filo del agua (The Edge of the Storm) and a work that greatly inspired it, Joyce's Ulysses. In doing so, I advance a new interdisciplinary approach that incorporates aesthetics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, narratology, ethics, and the haptic in order to show how these two narratives, despite generally being more associated with modernist themes such as alienation, not only contain but construct empathy as well. In Al filo del agua I focus primarily on the character Father Reyes as a figure of empathy, while in Ulysses I namely analyze Bloom, particularly within the blind stripling scene. I also include an examination of the striking woodblock prints that accompany the original edition of Al filo del agua in order to demonstrate how this text features empathy not only textually, but also visually. I ultimately argue that empathy primarily makes an appearance in Al filo del agua through its more political form, prosocial action, while in Ulysses empathy occurs principally in the form of perspective taking via the perspicacious musings of Bloom.