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About this book
Empathy has provoked equal measures of excitement and controversy in recent years. For some, empathy is crucial to understanding others, helping us bridge social and cultural differences. For others, empathy is nothing but a misguided assumption of access to the minds of others. In this book, Cummings argues that empathy comes in many forms, some helpful to understanding others and some detrimental. Tracing empathy’s genealogy through aesthetic theory, philosophy, psychology, and performance theory, Cummings illustrates how theatre artists and scholars have often overlooked the dynamic potential of empathy by focusing on its more “monologic” forms, in which spectators either project their point of view onto characters or passively identify with them. This book therefore explores how empathy is most effective when it functions as a dialogue, along with how theatre and performance can utilise the live, emergent exchange between bodies in space to encourage more dynamic, dialogic encounters between performers and audience.
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Empathy as Dialogue in Theatre and Performance
Authors: Lindsay B. Cummings
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59326-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-59325-2Published: 28 July 2016
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-95518-3Published: 30 May 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-59326-9Published: 12 July 2016
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 220
Topics: Performing Arts, Emotion