The Challenge of Otherness: J.M. Coetzee, the Sympathetic Imagination, and the Task of Literature

 Abstract — The paper explores the role of literature in generating empathy for those deemed radically other. In The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee, the character Elizabeth Costello challenges Thomas Nagel’s assertion that human beings will never be able to know what it is like to be another kind of animal because our imagination is limited by our own experience. Costello, an aging fiction writer, counters that there are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination and insists that if we are able to imagine the experience of fictional characters, we can imagine the experience of nonhuman animals. For Costello, literature teaches empathy. Most characters in Coetzee’s fiction, however, resist all attempts of identification and what they stage is rather the failure of the project of the sympathetic imagination. Coetzee seems therefore to be suggesting that the task of literature is to inspire attentiveness and respect for the irreducible alterity of other lives