Een schroothoop als gezamenlijk project

Abstract

A Scrapheap as Joint Enterprise: Intercultural Empathy in Tom Lanoye’s Het derde huwelijk So far, within the field of Dutch studies few have employed empathy to study texts on contemporary multiculturalism. Studying empathy as a cognitive and an affective phenomenon, this article combines insights from cognitive, affective and postcolonial research to establish several guidelines on how empathy functions between novel characters in an intercultural context. Rather than focussing on the empathic relations between reader and text, the article investigates empathy between fictional characters. As an example, an analysis of Tom Lanoye’s novel Het derde huwelijk [The Third Marriage] is offered. The analysis concentrates on the way in which the narrative uses a highly prejudiced author as an indictment against the West’s emotional inability with regard to migrants.