Woman, Sacrifice, and the Limits of Sympathy

doi:10.3868/s010-001-012-0011-1

Front Liter Stud Chin

2012, Vol. 6

Issue (2) : 184-197 https://doi.org/10.3868/s010-001-012-0011-1

research-article

Woman, Sacrifice, and the Limits of Sympathy

Haiyan Lee(

)

The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2000, USA

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Abstract

In both Lu Xun’s “The New Year’s Sacrifice” (1924) and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948), a woman is made a sacrificial victim by her village community, one symbolically and one literally. Using the two stories as my cross-cultural examples, I ponder the connection between the failure of sympathy and patriarchal sacrificial logic, and ask what literature can do to help create the condition of possibility for moral agency.

Keywords sympathy empathy moral agency literature woman Lu Xun Shirley Jackson

Corresponding Author(s): Haiyan Lee,Email:haiyan@stanford.edu

Issue Date: 05 June 2012

Cite this article:

Haiyan Lee. Woman, Sacrifice, and the Limits of Sympathy[J]. Front Liter Stud Chin, 2012, 6(2): 184-197.

URL:

https://academic.hep.com.cn/flsc/EN/10.3868/s010-001-012-0011-1
https://academic.hep.com.cn/flsc/EN/Y2012/V6/I2/184

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