Le Cœur est une permanence, suivi de Empathie et souffrance dans Tête première / Dos / Contre dos de Martine Audet
This M.A. thesis, combining research and creative writing, is divided in two parts: a poetry collection and an essay. The first part, Le Cœur est une permanance, explores different interpretations of empathy phenomenon in creative writing. In order for empathy to become the subject of my poetry collection I focused it’s discourse on the possibilities of a relation to another self. This relation takes form through the two entities of “I” (je) and “you” (tu). While the "I" comes into contact with its own darkness, it opens to the sufferings of the "you". Throughout the poetry collection, the "I" and the "you" soothe their pain by sharing it, making empathy a pathway to intimacy. This use of intimacy takes shape in three stages: the sections: replis de voix, point archimédien and ensembles vides. The poetry collection also gives special importance to the conception and representation of the body as a vehicle of suffering. The compilation proposes an interpretation of love that balances between shipwreck and promised land and uses childhood as a touchstone for questioning pain. The second part of this M.A thesis is an essay entitled Empathie et souffrance dans Tête première / Dos / Contre dos de Martine Audet. The essay, divided into three chapters, examines empathy throughout Audet’s poetry collection, through a biocultural approach. It specifically combines literary interpretation with second-generation cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind. The first chapter analyzes literary representations of the body taking into account the concept of "embodied simulation", developed by Vittorio Gallese. It suggests that literary representations of the body convey pain while revealing identity issues. With this theoretical basis, the second chapter studies the relation between the “I’ and the “you”. It also examines Husserl's phenomenology point of view of intersubjectivity to suggest the presence of an empathic, albeit problematic, link between the two presences in Audet’s collection. The final chapter explains how the representations of the environment, in which the two presences progress, mirror their suffering. To do this, it takes interests in the presence of certain key concepts related to the environment in Tête première / Dos / Contre dos, such as place and nature. These concepts are particularly important for present ecocriticism. They can also be considered from a biocultural point of view in this essay, since being built by the perceptions belonging to human cognition. By interpreting three main aspects of Audet’s poetry collection (literary representations of the body, intersubjectivity and environment), the hypothesis that the perception of pain in Tête première / Dos / Contre dos is essentially based on empathy as an effect and object of discourse is being validated.
Martine Audet Empathie Quebec poetry Biocultural approach Cognitive sciences Empathy Human body Intersubjectivity Environment