Current PhD Students

Katrina Wong

Thesis Title:

Empathic Engagement with the Unreliable: A Case Study of Kazuo Ishiguro

Supervisor:

Professor Richard Walsh

Description:

Unreliable homodiegetic narratives is often described as a subset of narrative communication that builds upon a conceptualised distance between the readers and the (implied) author against the unreliable character-narrator, subsequently building to irony. However, plenty of recent empirical studies suggest that while readers acknowledge the unreliability of the character-narrator, they nonetheless report experiences of emotional intimacy with the character-narrator during the reading experience. Through conducting an inquiry into a case study of Kazuo Ishiguro’s unreliable narratives, my doctoral thesis explores the possibility of ‘narrative empathy’ - an affective response that is based on imagination and cognition - as an alternate mechanism to describe the dynamic narrative transaction in unreliable homodiegetic narratives, leading to a triangulated bond of closeness. More specifically, my doctoral thesis starts from a rhetorical standpoint, inquiring into the collaborative relationship within the tripartite structure by suggesting ‘narrative empathy’ as an indispensable mechanism that allows authors to invoke a curious empathic engagement with the unreliable character-narrator and readers