This dissertation reveals the limits of transcorporeal empathy as an ethical paradigm in the Anthropocene. While environmental studies scholars have emphasized the entanglement of human and non-human bodies, or “transcorporeality,” as a starting point for environmental ethics, my project argues the opposite: that embodied identifications across species can as easily motivate violence as expand one’s sphere of environmental concern. To make this intervention, I turn to Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. In both novels, the protagonist over-identifies with the non-human world and in so doing, creates dangerous “fictions of empathy,” or stories that use conceptions of empathetic attachment to justify violence against others and the self. By showcasing the casualties of transcorporeal thinking, I also highlight the ethical potentialities of its inverse: estrangement, alienation, and distance. To develop this estranged environmental ethos, I analyze Paul Schrader’s film First Reformed and Louise Erdrich’s novel Future Home of the Living God. These works garner ethical force through representations of bodily alienation, a perspectival shift that, counterintuitively, creates visions of community. An ethical as well as aesthetical project, “Fictions of Empathy” ultimately imagines how literature might productively estrange readers from the non-human world, from themselves, and from the normative methodologies of literary study in the Anthropocene