ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between what Luc Boltanski has called the “politics of pity” and the eighteenth-century modernization of the literary field which was briefly outlined in my first chapter (Boltanski 1999: 3-19). It presents a case for the political utility of sentimental literature. And its larger purpose is to show how sympathy (the core category of a sentimental politics of pity) has, in the development of modern culture, been entangled with a more powerful but much less visible and contested category: that of the “interesting.” This topic is not simply academic for me. I began thinking about it from
out of a sense of outrage and helplessness in the face of a particular public event – the refusal, in August 2001, of the Australian government to allow the MV Tampa to enter Australian waters. For those readers unfamiliar with this events: the Tampa was a Norwegian tanker carrying 430 refugees who had been rescued from a sinking ferry and who wished to claim asylum in Australia under the 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (Marr and Wilkinson 2003). Without warning or precedent, the tanker was refused permission to dock in Australia, boarded by troops, and sailed under duress to Nauru, a remote, poor, ecologically devastated Pacific island whose leaders, after prolonged negotiation, allowed the asylum-seekers to be disembarked in return for the provision of health care and other benefits to their own citizens by the Australian government.1
