Volume-2, Issue-9, September 2026

Abstract

This paper examines the role of narrative empathy in traditional myths and folklore across diverse cultures, investigating how these ancient stories facilitate emotional understanding and moral development. Through a mixed-methods approach combining narrative analysis of 150 folktales from six cultural traditions with empirical studies measuring empathic responses, this research explores the mechanisms by which mythological narratives generate empathy and transmit cultural values. The study analyzes folktales from European, African, Asian, Indigenous American, Middle Eastern, and Oceanic traditions, focusing on recurring archetypal patterns and their empathy-inducing properties. Results indicate that certain narrative structures—particularly those featuring vulnerable protagonists, moral dilemmas, and transformative journeys—consistently evoke stronger empathic responses across cultural boundaries. The research reveals that folklore employs specific 
literary devices including perspective-taking cues, emotional mirroring, and moral exemplars to cultivate empathy. Cross-cultural analysis demonstrates that while surface elements of myths vary significantly, underlying empathy-generating mechanisms remain remarkably consistent, suggesting universal cognitive processes in narrative comprehension. These findings carry implications for understanding the evolutionary function of storytelling, the role of folklore in moral education, and applications of narrative empathy in therapeutic and educational contexts. The paper concludes that myths and folklore function as sophisticated empathy-training mechanisms that have evolved to promote prosocial behaviour and cultural cohesion through emotional engagement with archetypal human experiences. 

Keywords: Archetype, Cross-Cultural Analysis, Folklore, Moral Cognition, Narrative Empathy.

References

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[4] Djikic, M., Oatley, K., & Moldoveanu, M. C. (2013). Opening the closed mind: The effect of exposure to literature on the need for 
closure. Creativity Research Journal, *25*(2), 149-154. 
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[6] Johnson, D. R. (2012). Transportation into a story increases empathy, prosocial behavior, and perceptual bias toward fearful 
expressions. Emotion, *12*(1), 150-156. 
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[8] Bal, P. M., & Veltkamp, M. (2013). How does fiction reading influence empathy? An experimental investigation on the role of emotional 
transportation. PLoS ONE, *8*(1), e55341. 
[9] Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on 
Psychological Science, *3*(3), 173-192.

[10] Oatley, K. (1999). Why fiction may be twice as true as fact: Fiction as cognitive and emotional simulation. Review of General 
Psychology, *3*(2), 101-117. 
[11] Propp, V. (1968). Morphology of the folktale (L. Scott, Trans.). University of Texas Press. (Original work published 1928) 
[12] Thompson, S. (1946). The folktale. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 
[13] Wenzel, A. (2006). The phenomenology of narrative empathy. In A. Wenzel & N. Coyle (Eds.), Narrative and empathy (pp. 45-67). 
University of Chicago Press. 

Abstract

The acts of naming and labelling have emerged as contesting cultural practices that have persistently shaped the narratives and discourse surrounding the history of Japanese military comfort women. Terms such as comfort women, sex slaves, victims and survivors are interchangeably used to identify the Asian women subjected to the system of sexual slavery under the Japanese military regime during the Second World War. Such terminological homogenization, however, not only obscures the violence underpinning the system, but also erodes individuality, by regulating public memory and socio-political recognition. Drawing primarily on Butler's theory of injurious speech and performativity, this study undertakes a critical discourse analysis of Jan Ruff O'Herne's memoir Fifty Years of Silence, positing that the politics of naming is a performative and cultural phenomenon, which is neither inherently injurious nor emancipatory, rather conditioned by discursive practices through which euphemistic labels are imposed and institutionalized. The study further examines the counter-discourse enabled by reiterative acts of public testimony, reclamation of proper name and self-assertion as survivor, in resistance against historical and cultural erasure within the discourse of comfort women.

Keywords: Comfort Women, Performativity, Naming, Survivorhood, Jan Ruff O'Herne, Judith Butler.

References

1. Ahn, Y. (2018). Yearning for affection: Traumatic bonding between Korean "comfort women" and Japanese soldiers during World War II. European Journal of Women's Studies, *26*(4), 360-374. https://www.academia.edu/86889502
2. Butler, J. (1997). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. Psychology Press.
3. Cassinelli, S. M. (2019). It was Akiko 41; it was me. Women's Studies Quarterly, 193-208.
4. Ching, L. T. S. (2019). Shameful bodies, bodily shame: "Comfort women" and anti-Japanism in South Korea. In Anti-Japan: The politics of sentiment in postcolonial East Asia (pp. 57-79). Duke University Press.
5. Chunghee Sarah Soh. (2009). The comfort women: Sexual violence and postcolonial memory in Korea and Japan. University of Chicago Press.
6. Dionisio, A. (2025). "Against forgetting": The struggle for inclusive remembrance in the "comfort women" discourse. Women's History Review, *35*(3), 529-544. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2025.2524659
7. Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Pantheon Books.
8. Gilbert, P. R. (2021). The violated female body as nation: Cultural, familial, and spiritual identity in Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Women. Journal of Human Rights, 486-504.
9. Hannah, Y. (2022). Breaking the dehumanization and shaming of Asian comfort women: Theology of social sin and guilt shame. Theology and Practice, 379-412.
10. Hao, X., & Pan, J. (2025). Driven by nationalism and entertainment: The representation of "comfort women" on Weibo. Women's History Review, *34*(5), 836-858. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2025.2496091
11. Hwang, B. (1994). UCLA CKS - Comfort Women Resource Center. https://international.ucla.edu/cks/care/us_allieddocs/250902
12. Jan Ruff O'Herne. (2011). Fifty years of silence. Random House Australia.
13. Kim, M. (2020). Remnants, shame, and bearing witness in Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman. Women's Studies, *50*(5), 479-497. https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2020.1862843
14. Kumar, N., & Verma, K. (n.d.). The corporality of trauma and testimony: Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman. Rupkatha Journal.
15. Lee, J. J. (2020). How we disappeared. Oneworld Publications.
16. Kuwari, A. A. (2022). Contested national memories: Competing narratives of 'comfort women' in contemporary South Korea (pp. 1-135). https://repository.digital.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/1067872
17. Kim, Yeong-Seo. (2026, August 13). "Comfort women" survivors, another name is "miracle" [Flat]. KyungHyangSinmun. https://www.khan.co.kr/en/article/202608130704007
18. Lay, W. D. (2020). The origins and implementation of the comfort women system. https://www.academia.edu/100748671/The_Origins_and_Implementation_of_the_Comfort_Women_System
19. Levi, P. (1999). Other people's trades (p. 126). Abacus.
20. Lynch, A. (2018, October 21). Comfort women. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/comfort-women
21. Mendoza, K. R. (2003). Freeing the "slaves of destiny": The Lolas of the Filipino comfort women movement. Cultural Dynamics, *15*(3), 247-266. https://doi.org/10.1177/09213740030153002
22. Seaton, P. (2006). Reporting the "comfort women" issue, 1991–1992: Japan's contested war memories in the national press. Japanese Studies, *26*(1), 99-112. https://doi.org/10.1080/10371390600636307
23. Yuki Tanaka. (2002). Japan's comfort women: Sexual slavery and prostitution during World War II and the US occupation. Routledge.
24. Cassinelli, S. M. (2019). It was Akiko 41; it was me. Women's Studies Quarterly, 193-208.
25. Ching, L. T. S. (2019). Shameful bodies, bodily shame: "Comfort women" and anti-Japanism in South Korea. In Anti-Japan: The politics of sentiment in postcolonial East Asia (pp. 57-79). Duke University Press.
26. Gilbert, P. R. (2021). The violated female body as nation: Cultural, familial, and spiritual identity in Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Women. Journal of Human Rights, 486-504.
27. Hannah, Y. (2022). Breaking the dehumanization and shaming of Asian comfort women: Theology of social sin and guilt shame. Theology and Practice, 379-412.
28. Kumar, N., & Verma, K. (n.d.). The corporality of trauma and testimony: Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman. Rupkatha Journal.
29. Lee, J. J. (2020). How we disappeared. Oneworld Publications.
30. Madsen, D. L. (2007). Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman and the ethics of literary trauma. Concentric Literary and Cultural Studies, 81-97.
31. Shim, Y.-H. (2017). Metamorphosis of the Korean "comfort women": How did Han 恨 turn into the cosmopolitan morality? Development and Society, *46*(2), 251-278. http://www.jstor.org/stable/90013929.

Abstract

Anjum Hasan's short story collection Difficult Pleasures navigates the fractured psychological landscapes of contemporary urban life, exposing the profound emotional dissonance hidden beneath the surface of modern society. This paper explores the intricate manifestations of repression, guilt, and the unconscious across Hasan's narratives, arguing that the modern cityscape acts as a catalyst for her characters' internal moral conflicts. By employing a psychoanalytic framework, the study examines how individuals grapple with the shadow self, often evading moral responsibility and repressing the weight of their choices. For instance, the analysis highlights the profound moral blindness of the academic figure in "Immanuel Kant in Shillong," who ruins a student's future yet stubbornly fails to recognize his own culpability. Furthermore, the paper delves into the affective paralysis that characterizes interpersonal relationships throughout the collection, examining the severe psychological impact of fragmented family units on vulnerable children who face parental abandonment or divorce in poignant stories like "Birds" and "Hanging on Like Death." It also explores the suppressed desires and devastating physical consequences experienced by the protagonist in "The History of Touch," who is left completely isolated and deprived of human contact after pursuing an illicit romantic affair. Ultimately, the metropolis emerges as an oppressive psychological space where traditional bonds dissolve, leading to a pervasive sense of alienation. This research asserts that Hasan's characters remain caught in a perpetual, agonizing struggle between their conscious identities and repressed impulses, highlighting a postmodern condition where guilt is internalized and the unconscious dictates the trajectory of human connection.

Keywords: Shadow Self, Unconscious, Repression and Guilt, Anjum Hasan, Carl Jung.

References

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3. Bhattacharjee, S., & Karmakar, G. (Eds.). (2022). The city speaks: Urban spaces in Indian literature. Taylor & Francis.
4. Devi, M. S., & Dhanalakshmi, D. (2025). Deracination, affinity, and reconfiguration of folklore in Anjum Hasan's Neti Neti and Difficult Pleasures. The Yeats Journal of Korea, *78*, 141-164.
5. Hasan, A. (2012). Difficult pleasures. Penguin Books India.
6. Hossain, M. J., & Islam, M. R. (2024). The poetics of place and identity: An interview with Anjum Hasan. Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature, *18*(2), 173-183.
7. Hyde, L. (2008). Trickster makes this world: Mischief, myth, and art. Canongate Books.
8. Jacoby, M. (2016). Individuation and narcissism: The psychology of self in Jung and Kohut. Taylor & Francis.
9. Jung, C. G. (2012). The undiscovered self: With symbols and the interpretation of dreams. Princeton University Press.
10. Jung, C. G. (2014a). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self. Routledge.
11. Jung, C. G. (2014b). The archetypes and the collective unconscious. Routledge.
12. Jung, C. G. (2014c). Two essays on analytical psychology. Routledge.
13. Khair, T. (2016). Babu fictions: Alienation in contemporary Indian English novels. Oxford University Press.
14. Mhalunkar, S., & Hussain, M. L. (n.d.). The lost touch and memories in Anjum Hasan's "The History of Touch" in Difficult Pleasures.
15. Nath, G. (2024). The conflict of centre and periphery in the major works of Anjum Hasan. http://hdl.handle.net/10603/568704
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17. Prajapati, D. (n.d.). Food, food-culture, colours and smells in Anjum Hasan's short story "Wild Things" from Difficult Pleasures.
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19. Stevens, A. (2001). Jung: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.

Abstract

The postwar European novel has added a new dimension to modern man's perception of himself and his relation with the world of his own making. In this respect, the great Czech-French writer Milan Kundera (1929–2023) has deeply fascinated contemporary novelists and critics. In his fusion of fiction and philosophy in his magnum opus The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), which the paper aims to discuss, he has discovered a new art of composition. His profound philosophical reflections on power and truth, human existence and the fragility of human values, read like a lamentation on the death of the ideas and values of European Modernity, as the paper argues. Written against a very palpable historically and politically charged atmosphere, Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is also a scathing criticism of the tyranny of the Communist regime imposed in the wake of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. But the historicity of the novel should not be overemphasized. Its philosophical and symbolic ramifications go far beyond the historicity of the text as explored in the paper. It would be far more rewarding to read it as a symbolic work which makes one conscious of a disposition of tyranny of power which one can perceive in the behaviour of contemporary political dispensations irrespective of political ideology. Furthermore, the novel makes the reader conscious of what man has made of man in a world developed on the design of the image of Christian anthropology and the idea of progress.

Keywords: Kundera, Modernism, Progress, Totalitarianism, Existence, Lightness of Being

References

1. Antakyalioglu, Z. (2025). Art is elsewhere: The Festival of Insignificance as Milan Kundera's farewell to aesthetics. In K. von Kunes (Ed.), Milan Kundera known and unknown (pp. 143-165). Bloomsbury Academic.
2. Arendt, H. (1994a). The origin of totalitarianism. A Harvest Book.
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4. Donahue, B. (1984). Laughter and ironic humor in the fiction of Milan Kundera. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, *25*(2), 67-76. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.1984.9937788
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7. Just, D. (2015). Milan Kundera and the poetics of novelistic truth. Poetics Today, *36*(3), 175-200.
8. Kundera, M. (2003). The unbearable lightness of being (M. H. Heim, Trans.). Penguin Books in association with Faber and Faber.
9. Kussi, P. (1983). Milan Kundera: Dialogues with fiction. World Literature Today, *57*(2), 206-209.
10. Ownbey, C. (2019). Milan Kundera and the radical autonomy of art. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, *61*(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2019.1642844
11. Pichova, H. (1992). The narrator in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The Slavic and East European Journal, *36*(2), 217-226.
12. Rupnik, J. (2025). Milan Kundera and the reinvention of Central Europe. In K. von Kunes (Ed.), Milan Kundera known and unknown (pp. 255-263). Bloomsbury Academic.
13. Steinby, L. (2023). Kundera and modernity. Purdue University Press.
14. Webb, I. (1990). Milan Kundera and the limits of scepticism. The Massachusetts Review, *31*(3), 357-368.
15. Weeks, M. (2005). Milan Kundera: A modern history of humor amid the comedy of history. Journal of Modern Literature, *28*(3), 130-148.
16. Wirth, J. M. (2025). Remembering Milan Kundera and the laughing God. In K. von Kunes (Ed.), Milan Kundera known and unknown (pp. 9-15). Bloomsbury Academic.