A study on the emotional engagement in J.M. Coetzee's The Trilogy of Jesus and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

The following study consists of three chapters and will analyse the relationship between reader and literature, particularly focusing on the role that the latter has in shaping the people’s emotional engagement and reaction in real life. One of the disciplines that scientifically analyses this relationship is The Affect Studies – presented in the first chapter - characterised by different schools of thought and theories that share the same purpose: understanding the human brain and the systems involved in the processing of emotions. Visual arts, like literature, have an important role in helping scientists to comprehend the elaboration and representation of the emotional experience. Consequently, the theories and studies about emotion will be examined in depth in the second and third chapter concerning J.M. Coetzee’s The Trilogy of Jesus (2013, 2016, 2019) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). With the first author the emotion analysed is love but represented in a negative light, indeed one of the characters who appears in the second book, Dmitri, commits a crime of passion against his lover Maria Magdalena. On the other hand, in the second novel - which is set in an alternative reality where the world is divided between clones and humans - the analysis focuses on the empathetic feeling of compassion felt or repressed by different characters.