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Full Description
The scrutiny of pity as a cardinal altruistic attribute has emerged in the last two decades as a significant common denominator in disciplines ranging from philosophy to social psychology and comparative literature to gender studies. Pity is a term and concept of tremendous importance to a historian and interpreter of the humanities and social sciences. It is a prism through which to examine how given cultures attach value to nonrational components of social life and of human flourishing. Sánchez describes how an appeal to a reader's sense of traditional pity in the writings of French philosophers, pedagogues, social theorists, and novelists interacted, in the sociopolitical sphere of the de-siècle, with the interest in studying and promoting this very virtue as a principle of social attachment.
This study brings to light striking parallels from one de-siècle to another, highlighting the extensive rhetorical and emotive investment of various French disciplines in both probing and promoting pity. In doing so, a number of French thinkers and writers, both major and subsequently ignored, forged a cognitive theory of sentiments that intriguingly presages contemporary theories. They also codified a discursively and rhetorically doctrinaire pity that was reflected in pedagogy, especially female education; political philosophy and psychology; literary criticism and fiction—in ways that are still instructive for us today.
Contents
Introduction: Pity, Past and Present Prologue: The French Pro-Pity Tradition Pity at the Center of a Renascent Sentimentalism "Affective Philosophy": Pity as Cognitive Sentiment The "Altar" of Civilization Between Social Psychology and Pedagogy Patrimonial, Social, and Pedagogical Anxieties Around Pity Schopenhauer and Nietzsche The Solidarity Movement and the Dreyfus Affair Engendering Pity The Patrimony of Literary Pity in Fin-de-Siecle Fiction Debating at the Goncourts' "Grenier" Cosmopolitanism or FranciTE From Germinie to Germinal A Rhetoric of the Feminine: Paul Bourget, Octave Mirbeau, and Leon Bloy Moving the Past: Marcel Proust and Pierre Loti Conclusion Bibliography
