lori33
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Could I please get assistance with improving this assignment, I've tried revising it several times without positive results.
These passages—the first from Kaja Silverman’s The Threshold of the Visible World (1995), the second from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759/ 1790)—link sympathy and spectacle in ways that, I will argue in this book, take paradigmatic form in Victorian fiction. In each, a confrontation between a spectator “at ease” and a sufferer raises issues about their mutual constitution; in each, the sufferer is effectively replaced by the spectator’s image of him or herself. As instances of what I wish to call “scenes of sympathy,” these two passages, along with other scenes and texts discussed in the chapters that follow, document modern sympathy’s inseparability from representation: both from the fact of representation, in a text’s modulation toward the visual when the topic is sympathy, and from issues that surround representation, such as the relation between identity and its visible signs.
These passages—the first from Kaja Silverman’s The Threshold of the Visible World (1995), the second from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759/ 1790)—link sympathy and spectacle in ways that, I will argue in this book, take paradigmatic form in Victorian fiction. In each, a confrontation between a spectator “at ease” and a sufferer raises issues about their mutual constitution; in each, the sufferer is effectively replaced by the spectator’s image of him or herself. As instances of what I wish to call “scenes of sympathy,” these two passages, along with other scenes and texts discussed in the chapters that follow, document modern sympathy’s inseparability from representation: both from the fact of representation, in a text’s modulation toward the visual when the topic is sympathy, and from issues that surround representation, such as the relation between identity and its visible signs.