‘The Cruel Radiance of What Is’: Empathy, Imagination and Estrangement in Johan van der Keuken's Face Value and Herman Slobbe

This article takes up film and imagination via the problem of empathy. Proposing a different entry into contemporary polemics over empathy, the ‘empathic imagination’ is reconceptualized as a problematic of form rather than psychological experience. That is, instead of adopting a pre-given notion of empathy to illuminate the relation between film and the spectator's moral imagination, this article considers how that imagination is constituted in and through the image to begin with. After tracing the genealogy of empathy ( Einfühlung) in German aesthetics, the concept is put into play through readings of ‘#Look Beyond Borders’, an online video produced by Amnesty International, and two documentaries by Johan van der Keuken – Face Value (1991) and Herman Slobbe (1966). In these works, the facial image is read as the imaginary terrain in which to explore very different notions of what might count as empathy and the empathic imagination in film and media.

The Dancer as Statue and the Geopolitics of Neoclassicism

An examination of the influences of German thought on French dance theory, an area of scholarship that has been neglected, but is beginning to emerge in the interest in Nietzsche’s influence on Valéry. Lifar epitomized the idea of the dancer as animated marble figure sculpture, an idea traced back to Winkelmann and Hegel’s Lectures on the Fine Arts. Lifar operates in a triangle of cultural influences including France, Germany, and Russia. This chapter thus reveals the influence of eighteenth-century German aesthetics on the Russo-French theory of ballet neoclassicism. Particular attention is paid to Lifar’s interpretation of Apollo in George Balanchine’s Apollon Musagète in its first years.

The Great War Poets and the Campaign for Empathy

The British soldier-poets of the Great War (1914–1918) composed works that openly, intuitively sought empathy from civilians back home and commanders absent from the Western front. As a term coined only in 1909, empathy was derived, ironically, from German aesthetics (Einfühlung) by an English psychologist: two peoples imaginatively and intellectually engaged in peacetime, later locked in a prolonged, mutual slaughter. While most of the war poets had never heard the word, many of their poems demonstrate a variety of concepts and tropes that we recognise to be empathic. Examining lines by some of the war’s most famous poets – Edward Thomas, Thomas Sorley, Isaac Rosenberg, Charles Sorley, and Ivor Gurney – the authors illustrate ways the poets campaigned for empathy in verse.

Continental Romanticism in Britain

This chapter argues on the basis of several constellations of writers that British Romanticism, far from being Europhobic, drew strength from direct contact with Continental sources. The term ‘romantic’ itself, as contrasted with ‘classical’, gained a new inflection through the Schlegel brothers’ works. In Weimar in 1804, Henry Crabb Robinson presented lectures on German aesthetics to Germaine de Staël, whose work then popularized the notion of aesthetic autonomy in Britain, paving the way for the reception of A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Friedrich Schlegel’s Lectures on the History of Literature, meanwhile, informed a nationalist approach to literature through J. G. Lockhart’s translation. Italophile writers, by contrast, resisted this northern style of Romanticism. Not only Shelley and Leigh Hunt, but also Byron, who had contact with the Italian exile Ugo Foscolo, came to regard Dante as a model for political renovation after the Napoleonic Wars.