“Empathetics Inc.”: Lecture by Jane Thrailkill

Abstract: Just as titles like “The Limits of Empathy” and “After Empathy” are populating humanities conferences, academic medicine is embracing empathy as essential to clinical competence. Yet efforts to put empathy to use in healthcare has in turn produced a sub-genre of clinical humor that pokes fun at the instrumentalization of feeling. This paper takes the tension between empathy and what Henri Bergson called “the comic spirit” as the occasion to explore how dark humor, which uses incongruity to point up social and structural absurdities, might serve as a productive mode of cognition and critique. The difficult question, from a health humanities perspective, is whether the “comic frame” (to use Kenneth Burke’s term) merely produces a site for illumination – and possibly subversion – of medical-bureaucratic norms or also provides space for essential conversations about burnout, patient care, clinical competence, and compassion.

Bio: Jane F. Thrailkill is Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Trained as a literary scholar, she works on the relationship between literature and science, widely construed. Her first book is Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism (Harvard UP, 2007), and she is finishing a second monograph on the play-based philosophies of the James siblings, Alice, William, and Henry. From 2015-2016 she directed the MA concentration in Literature, Medicine, and Culture; she is currently co-director of HHIVE, a new health humanities lab housed in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. “Empathetics, Inc.” forms the core of a short monograph she is writing entitled The Agonies of Empathy in U.S. Medical Education.