The State of Empathy and the Politics of Care in British Women's Writing

The Literature Major hosted Emily Ridge, Lecturer Above the Bar at the National University of Ireland Galway, on her talk concerning a strand of mid-century British women’s writing characterised by an ambivalence towards empathy and care. In the talk, she interpreted in specific relation both to the traumatising effects of World War II and to a wider process of institutionalising, bureaucratising and commodifying care from the 1930s onwards, drawing on theories of governmentality and surveillance developed by Michel Foucault, Nikolas Rose and others. Within this interdisciplinary framework, multiple ways in which women writers respond to the evolution of a discourse of care and empathy in British public, political and commercial life were investigated and discussed.