Sara Baila Bigné, who was a pre-doctoral researcher at the ADHUC research centre, will defend her doctoral thesis entitled ‘Towards a Semantics of Narrative Emotions. The Case of Extreme Empathy’, supervised by Dr Cristina Alsina Rísquez.
The thesis aims to demonstrate that narrative emotions play an essential role in fictional semantics, that they are contained and transmitted in narrative text through formal literary devices and that, therefore, they are susceptible to narratological analysis. To this end, the study uses ‘extreme empathy’ or empathy towards immoral characters as a case study. Through a narratological analysis of two contemporary novels, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966) and Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones (2006), it analyses how extreme empathy acts both as a textual strategy and as a phenomenological experience facilitated by parasocial worlds — fictional universes that favour the expansion of the reader's moral and emotional capacities.
This interdisciplinary research combines narratology, hermeneutics, aesthetics, semantics, and political philosophy, establishing a dialogue between academic fields that are rarely connected. It proposes a semantics of fictional emotions, which are reformulated in this thesis as essential elements for the construction of fictional worlds, made possible by the parasocial conditions of fiction and transmitted to the reader through narrative structures.
