ABSTRACT
The newly arisen interest in the representation of emotions in literature, fine arts, media, and other cultural artefacts has caused an “emotional turn” in cultural studies since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Several disciplines are involved in this process: cognitive psychology, philosophy, pedagogy, linguistics, neuroscience, and literary studies, among others. This enumeration clearly demonstrates that a complex phenomenon such as the development and impact of emotions can only adequately analysed by a juxtaposition of different academic perspectives, thus eliciting an interdisciplinary perspective. One important aspect of the study of emotions is the phenomenon of empathy, a term coined by the American psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener in 1909. This term, which has etymological roots in Antique Greek and might be literally translated as “compassion,” was Titchener’s translation of the German notion “Einfühlung” (i.e., the German translation of the Antique Greek term), which was a seminal concept in German aesthetics and philosophy at the turn of the century. Nonetheless, this concept was strictly refused by philosophers and psychologists inspired by new realism in the 1920s, because they claim that this idea is based on a non-analytical access.
