The Feeling of the Form

The Feeling of the Form explores the concept of Einfuehlung—the projection of human feelings and life into inanimate forms—developed by German aesthetic theorists in the late nineteenth century. The word would be translated into English as "empathy" and migrate in meaning from the aesthetic to the interpersonal sphere. Combining close analysis and cultural "para-history," The Feeling of the Form reads literary texts by Georg Buechner, Adalbert Stifter, and Rainer Maria Rilke alongside philosophical texts by Robert Vischer, Vernon Lee, and Theodor Lipps to uncover the often-uncanny intersections of aesthetic and interpersonal empathy.

Traveling both backward and forward in time from the 1873 invention of Einfuehlung, Joseph R. Metz traces the diverse and multidirectional exchanges among subjects and objects, feelings and forms, and selves and others that together yield an expanded understanding of Einfuehlung, empathy, and the connections between them. In its surprising juxtapositions, The Feeling of the Form also shows how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts prefigure a wide array of later thought, including affect theory, "other minds," artificial intelligence, object-oriented ontology, and cinema and video game aesthetics.

Joseph R. Metz is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Utah.

Joseph R. Metz productively puts literary works in conversation with forgotten works of historical physiology and contemporary affect theory, convincingly showing how the aesthetic problem of sensual apprehension opens out of the psychological and ethical problem of feeling with (or through) otherness itself.

John T. Hamilton, author of France/Kafka:

An incisive and finely tuned study, The Feeling of the Form retraces the complex itineraries that link distinct acceptations of empathy from aesthetic to interpersonal concerns, from optimistic aspirations to darker ramifications. By staging provocative dialogues between theory and literature, Joseph Metz makes a crucial contribution to current debates that grapple with the ambitions and fears concerning a materialist unconscious. A tour de force that vividly demonstrates the urgency of close reading, historical discernment, and astute reflection.