Empathy and the reader (Zef Pllumi’s memoir)
Empathy and the reader (Zef Pllumi’s memoir)

Summary/Abstract: Although the first use of the term empathy refers to the kinaesthetic engagement with objects of art, today, the old Einfühlung encompasses a variety of definitions taken from various perspectives of human knowledge. The issue presented here concerns the particular correlation between empathetic responsiveness and memoir, which is explored primarily by attempting to reach apprehension of its particular nature and, secondly, by identifying potential empathy-based responses evoked by certain narrative situations of referential basis and narrative techniques. The importance of testimonial literature created after the fall of communism in Albania, which constitutes the poetics of personal, primarily lies in its reliability as a reconstruction of collective memory and identity through the individual memory, transcending individual events and experiences by evoking universal affective states. In this sense, Live to Tell, a narrative of repression and resistance, is the paradigm of Albanian literary testimony. The assertion of whether literature impacts prosocial behaviour as a result of empathetic evocations on its readers has not yet attained scientifically conclusive support. Despite this potential pragmatic quality, it is suggested here that the importance of empathy should be seen in its relation to the significance of a certain literary work, as long as it is considered a cognitive and affective path, at the end of which the reader will reach a higher moral ground. Transcending its particularity, Live to Tell attains universality through the ethics it provokes, regarding this a distinctive value of our shared humanity.

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