A #PresentingACCUTE Interview

With the upcoming 2025 ACCUTE Conference at George Brown College from 30th May- June 2nd, we have been having an interview series of #PresentingACCUTE which focuses on some of the presenters in conversation with Gladwell Pamba, ACCUTE’s Coordination and Communications Assistant. Next up on the series is Professor Facundo from Queen’s University.  AC Facundo is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Queen’s University and a registered psychotherapist in private practice based in Toronto. Specializing in literary theory and psychoanalysis, her[/their] research and teaching explores the relationship between literature and mental health.

Tell us about what you’ll be focusing on in your presentation

I’m trying to revisit the concept of Empathy. Everyone assumes that we know what empathy is. That is, putting yourself in the other person’s shoes. That’s the assumption. That’s the premise. I want to use my readings of literature to say it’s a little bit more complicated than that because that’s called projective identification and a more generative form of empathy integrates difference into it. Part of my argument is for a kind of empathy that maintains a productive and irreconcilable tension between sameness and difference. I approach my reading practice to elaborate that kind of empathy and so for the presentation, I’m reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. The reader’s empathy for the characters shift over time, which is something that I’m interested in.

Where did this work come from?

I have a forthcoming article in Modern Fiction Studies on elaborating empathy In Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant so I’m kind of testing it on Klara and the sun. In Ishiguro’s novels, there’s always a heart wrenching twist at the end of his novels. Part of the reason is that we expect the thing that will hurt us the most. Yet the narrative does a good job of seducing us away from that realistic expectation. This is what I am really interested in. That through phantasy, the twist highlights where we get emotionally invested in the novel.Ishiguro is able to do it in every one of his novels. He evokes that kind of affective reaction, at least in me. I’m also interested in redefining empathy as part of a larger project to reintroduce psychoanalysis into literary studies. It was popular in the early 90s other than Lacanian analysis and its role in literary studies for critique. I want to do the work of introducing what I’m calling a post-critical psychoanalysis into literary studies so we can think about psychoanalysis in terms of mental health. Like what does it mean to survive in a world that’s falling apart and be empathic? Part of my argument is we’re empathic and we read literature to elaborate our empathy. Not because we’re good people, but because it’s the very thing that keeps us sane. Ishiguro always introduces a complexity about our own relationship to empathy so I want to explore that. He does a lot with post-human or the inhuman as opposed to the human. There are always these subjects that have a status of less human. This is where he manipulates our empathic investment. Klara and the Sun is about an android who is a helper to this child, a companion. I wanted to elaborate empathy around this figure but that was before I made an enemy in my mind of chat GPT. So I’m trying to redefine empathy.

Recommend to ACCUTE members something that you’re listening to, watching or reading

Nosferatu, the film by Robert Eggers. It’s sticking in my mind now because it’s so rare for me to go to a theater and watch a film. There is that kind of embodied experience of going to a film and be immersed in aesthetic horror, that gothic imagery that draws from a lot of film history, the way that the lighting is, the dynamic between the two characters, and the kind of disrupting of this kind of sexualized Dracula figure replacing it with a rotting corpse. I think it’s really haunting and it’s really beautiful.

What do you love doing besides teaching, researching or writing?

I like oil painting. I’ve been oil painting since I was 15. So I try to do it on Sundays. Edges pain representational art is something that I haven’t actually integrated into my intellectual life. As a psychotherapist, a lot of all of these activities are integrated into my research. That’s why I’m thinking about empathy. But for painting, I haven’t been able to think about my art practice within an intellectual framework or an academic framework. And that’s probably a nice thing.