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This project explores the concept of empathy as a rhetorical stance and strategy of engaging across marked social differences. It contributes to Krista Ratcliffe’s call for scholars in rhetoric and composition studies to "map more theoretical terrain and provide more pragmatic tactics for peaceful, cross-cultural negotiation and coalition building" (Rhetorical Listening 72). I define rhetorical empathy as a trope characterized by narrative and emotional appeals and as a topos or attitude interlocutors adopt to engage with socially marked difference, building on Susan Miller’s conception of rhetoric as emotion-based trust (Trust in Texts).This dissertation also addresses a gap in studies on empathy within cognitive science and psychology that typically focus on bodily responses to attempt to measure someone’s level of empathetic engagement within staged scenarios. Such studies often do not take into account the social position of research subjects or the role of motivations in empathetic responses. My research methodology for this project involves an analysis of three rhetorical exchanges involving marked social difference: in Chapter Three I focus on class in two late-nineteenth labor rights speeches of Jane Addams; Chapter Four centers on the intersection of sexuality/gender and religion in the rhetoric of two contemporary gay rights activists; and in Chapter Five I focus on constructions of race in the online, multimodal response of a minority student group to a racist Twitter incident at a midwestern U.S. university. I identify the following recurring and recursive moves as characteristic of rhetorical strategies based on empathy:•Appealing to the personal within discourse systems: experience and emotions •Considering motives behind speech acts and actions•Confronting difference and injustice•Situating a rhetorical exchange as part of an ongoing process of mutual understanding and (ex)change (including vulnerability and self-critique on the part of the rhetor) Rhetorical empathy functions as a way of forming connections and shifting power dynamics among interlocutors within a complex web of rhetorical exchange. By combining rhetoric and empathy, I highlight aspects of each: rhetoric as a strategic use of symbol systems using various modes of communication—language, still and moving images, and sound—and, after Wispe ("Distinction" 318), empathy as involving both a volitional, deliberate attempt to understand an Other and the emotional elements involved in such attempts. |
