Embedded Files
Reading Bodies
Reading Bodies interrogates the history of how we have understood knowledge about others' bodies and their pain, from philosophy of perception with David Hume, to philosophy of language with Friedrich Müller, to virtue ethics in the novels of Wilkie Collins. Contemporary questions around emotional and bodily knowledge, I argue, are inseparable from the Victorian conception of novel-reading as a practice to cultivate empathy. Victorians imagined fictional bodies as capable of evoking material effects in their readers, and that those effects trained readers to respond more ethically to the bodies around them—an understanding of empathy and imagination that continues today.
While Reading Bodies is part literary history, part philosophy of science, it is ultimately an call for "ethically transformative and socially useful reading," as Clare Walker Gore writes in her review of the book. Understanding where our ideas about empathy and embodied knowledge begin illuminates whom those ideas left on the margins. To claim to understand another's body is to control that body; often, in nineteenth-century thinking, access to knowledge comes at the cost of someone else's body—almost always a woman, often working-class. At its core, Reading Bodies articulates a commitment to the ethics of care through acknowledgement (Cavell) and recognition (Ricoeur). By combining narrative, virtue, and feminist ethics with historical examination of how we represent others’ bodies, I argue that while we cannot know what happens in another person’s body, we can inculcate receptivity to their experiences.
Rather than treat suffering bodies as metaphors to be unpacked and understood, I celebrate materialist acknowledgement of suffering: to respond to suffering not with I know how you feel, but with Tell me what you feel.
By ending, as he began, with his own, unabashed commitment to the ideal of ethically transformative and socially useful reading ... Katz ... makes a bold claim for the present urgency of Victorian studies.
- Clare Walker Gore, The Review of English Studies
Katz shows a deft command of the scientific, literary, and periodical press textual traditions. He weaves together these genres to continually return us to the experience of reading in the nineteenth century. This book is an important addition to the conversation around Victorian psychology and science.
- Christian Lehmann, Dickens Quarterly
After your encounter with this book, it won’t be possible to think about readers’ and characters’ bodies, language, or literary studies in the same way. A dazzling achievement.
- Kevin Morrison, Henan University
Journal Articles & Book Chapters
Pain & Empathy
Forthcoming. “Movements that Matter: How Martial Arts Studies Can Reframe the Ethics of First-Blush Empathy.” Martial Arts Studies Journal.
Combines neuroethics, philosophy of perception, and continental philosophy of embodiment to explore the practice and cultivation of empathy through martial arts studies.
2023. “Speculative Capital, Speculative Reading: The Materialist Ethics of Fiction in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend and The Pickwick Papers.” Dickens Studies Annual vol. 54, no. 3, pp. 121–146.
Explores the history of economic speculation, evolutionary psychology, and speculation about what others feel through materialist feminism and Charles Dickens's novels.
2023. with Sarah Tanner. “Under Strange and Evil Stars: Ecologies of Pain in Steinbeck’s To A God Unknown.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 179–199.
Unpacks the relationship between pain, knowledge, and the environment through continental philosophy and ecocriticism.
2022. with Sarah Tanner. “Mapping Feeling: Geography, Affect, and History on the London Streets through Study Abroad.” Victorian Culture and Experiential Learning, edited by Kevin Morrison, Palgrave, pp. 143–160.
Considers embodiment and the cultivation of receptivity as a pedagogical and ethical practice.
2016. “Staging the Streets: The Theatricality of Science in fin-de-siècle Martial Arts.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 343–361.
Brings together continental philosophy of embodiment and cultural criticism to consider how bodies shape themselves and one another through movement and ideology.
History and Philosophy of Science
Forthcoming. “The Mechanics of Pain: Associationism, Motive, and Action in Heart and Science.” Science and Literature in the 19th Century, Palgrave MacMillan.
Explores historical philosophy of perception through archival research and literary criticism.
2015. Editor. Victorian Science and Literature, special issue of Critical Survey, vol. 27, no. 2. Including editor’s introduction, “Victorian Literature and Science: Introduction.” pp. 1–4.
Special issue on history and philosophy of science, cultural criticism, and literary criticism.
Ethics
Forthcoming. with William Davis. “The Practice of the Pause: Cultivating Reflection as an Intrinsic Good in STEM Ethics Pedagogy.” Teaching Ethics.
An axiological examination of the intrinsic value of ethics pedagogy that argues for the embodied cultivation of critical thinking.
2023. “Second Hand Politics: Sartorial Culture, Socialism, and the Work of the Novel in Walter Besant’s Children of Gibeon.” Political and Sartorial Styles in Britain and Its Colonies, 1840–1926, edited by Kevin Morrison, Manchester UP, pp. 78–96.
Argues against the metaphorization of bodies in political movements through feminism and the ethics of care, focused through nineteenth-century liberal and socialist movements.
2017. “Redefining the Republic of Letters: The Literary Public and Mudie’s Circulating Library.” Journal of Victorian Culture vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 399–417.
Epistemological investigation of how literary and cultural value slide into moral value through archival research and political philosophy.
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