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Empathy and the Ethics of Entitlement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Ronald J. Pelias
Ronald J. Pelias
Affiliation:
Associate Professor in the Department of Speech Communication, Southern Illinois University.
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Extract

With the increasing familiarity of reception theory, deconstruction, collective creation and performance art, it seems as if performers have assumed they should pursue their craft unencumbered by textual dictates. Actors appear to be privileging their own interests over the interests of characters or literary personae. Even when actors turn from fictive characters to real life personalities in their presentations of one-person shows, oral histories and performance ethnographies, it seems less fashionable to discuss the people that serve as a basis for such performances than to focus upon the actors' personal preferences and individual visions. The question is no longer how performers might put flesh on the textual and human ‘skeletons’ they encounter but how they might pull a bone from here and another one from there in order to create their own figures. In short, ‘the other’ serves performers.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , Summer 1991 , pp. 142 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1991

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References

Notes

1. This is a fairly common definition of empathy. For example, see Chandler, Michael J., ‘Social Cognition: A Selective Review of Current Research’, in Knowledge and Development: Advances in Theory and Research, eds. Overton, Willis F. and Gallagher, Jeanette McCarthy (New York: Plenum, 1977), 93–142CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smither, Suzanne, ‘A Reconsideration of the Developmental Study of Empathy’, Human Development, 20 (1977): 253–76CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; or Pelias, Ronald J., ‘Empathy: Some Implications of Social Cognition Research For Interpretation Study’, Central States Speech Journal 33 (1982): 519–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Wesker, Arnold, ‘Interpretation: To Impose or Explain’, Performing Arts Journal 11 (1988): 62–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. This explanation originates from Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, trans. Hapgood, Elizabeth Reynolds (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1952), 39–67.Google Scholar

4. Braden, Gorden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 106.Google Scholar

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6. Earth, John, The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (New York: Perigree, 1984), 79.Google Scholar

7. Roloff, Leland H., ‘Performer, Performing, Performance: Toward a Psychologicalization of Theory’, Literature in Performance 3 (04 1983): 13–24.Google Scholar

8. Roloff, , 15.Google Scholar

9. For an excellent discussion of the distinction between projective and adoptive empathy, see Parrella, Gilda C., ‘Projection and Adoption: Toward a Clarification of the Concept of Empathy’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 57 (1971): 204–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Wilshire, Bruce, Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), xiv.Google Scholar

11. Wilshire, , 89.Google Scholar

12. Wilshire, , 97–100.Google Scholar

13. Geertz, Clifford, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 4–5.Google Scholar

14. The notion of aesthetic distance was first developed by Edward Bullough. See his ‘“Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle”, The British Journal of Psychology 5 (06 1912): 87–118.Google Scholar For a more recent discussion of the concept, see Chaim, Daphna Ben, Distance in the Theatre: The Aesthetics of Audience Response (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984).Google Scholar

15. For a discussion of these positions, see Duerr, Edwin, The Length and Depth of Acting (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1962)Google Scholar or Cole, Toby and Chinoy, Helen Krich, eds. Actors on Acting, 3rd ed. (New York: Crown, 1957).Google Scholar

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21. For Victor Turner's most extended discussion of this idea, see his From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 20–60.Google Scholar

22. Archer, William, Masks or Faces? (New York: Hill & Wang, 1957), 184–200.Google Scholar

23. I am indebted to Wayne C. Booth for the concept of ‘overstanding’. See his Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 235–55.Google Scholar

24. Booth, Wayne C., ‘Introduction’, in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin, Mikhail, ed. and trans. Emerson, Caryl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxi.Google Scholar