Anyone who wishes to bring empathy to literature (and vice versa) must engage with Suzanne Keen’s penetrating and incisive study in Empathy and the Novel, defining literary empathy studies. Though Keen is inclined to favor the hypothesis, reading novels is humanizing, expanding empathy, Keen is an empiricist and marshals significant evidence on both sides of the debate, concluding that the jury is still out. On background, Lord Kames famously compared the absorption of the reader in the novel to a waking dream. Old empathy in the New Novel (Nouveau Roman) takes a critical look at “empathic unsettlement,” and, especially, Nathalie Sarraute and her method of narrated monologue. Sarraute’s writing gives to the reader “analogous sensations” as a “projective” translation, which is related to empathy in an outbound direction, proceeding from the character to the reader. The character puts her sensations into the reader, “discovering, lens in hand, the micro-structure of life” (Sarraute). Radical empathy engages the empathic distresses of mimesis under stress, literary shock therapy, and a brain in vat. Mimesis (of all kinds) is under stress in Beckett. In Beckett’s The Unnameable, one particularly powerful misfiring of empathy gives us—a brain in a vat—delivering the experience of solipsism. The consequences of literary shock therapy for empathy are considered.