McGlothlin, Erin. “Empathetic Identification and the Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction: A Proposed Taxonomy of Response” – 2016

McGlothlin sets out to explore readers’ empathetic engagement with narrative depictions of the perspective of the perpetrators, positioning herself within the recent turn towards the figure of the perpetrator in Holocaust Studies scholarship. In face of a still prevailing anxiety about the risks and ethical stakes involved in the empathetic identification with the consciousness of perpetrators in fictional representations, her article provides a productive theoretical framework to critically assess and classify this phenomenon.

Although she acknowledges recent narratological scholarship on narrative empathy – partly building her argumentation upon it – McGlothlin adopts the term “identification” for her discussion. More precisely, she proposes a processual understanding of identification, which makes it possible to address fluctuations between types and degrees of reader investment as the act of reading unfolds. Within this framework, empathy is but one of several functions of readerly identification, one of many different ways of aligning mentally or emotionally with the perpetrators’ perspective through processes of imagination. These processes – despite being in part unconscious – presuppose a sense of active agency on the part of the reader to choose to engage (or not) with the narrating or focalizing perpetrator. McGlothlin’s notion of identification thus comprises a cognitive, an emotional, and an ethical dimension.

Author of this entry: Sofia Forchieri

McGlothlin, Erin. “Empathetic Identification and the Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction: A Proposed Taxonomy of Response.” Narrative 24, no. 3 (2016): 251-76.