Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions - Couverture souple

Woodward, Kathleen

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0822343770 ISBN 13 : 9780822343776

Editeur : Duke University Press, 2009

Synopsis

Book by Woodward Kathleen

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

In this moving and thoughtful book, Kathleen Woodward explores the politics and poetics of the emotions, focusing on American culture since the 1960s. She argues that we are constrained in terms of gender, race, and age by our culture's scripts for 'emotional' behavior and that the accelerating impoverishment of interiority is a symptom of our increasingly media-saturated culture. She also shows how we can be empowered by stories that express our experience, revealing the value of our emotions as a crucial form of intelligence. Referring discreetly to her own experience, Woodward examines the interpenetration of social structures and subjectivity, considering how psychological emotions are social phenomena, with feminist anger, racial shame, old-age depression, and sympathy for non-human cyborgs (including robots) as key cases in point. She discusses how emerging institutional and discursive structures engender 'new' affects that in turn can help us understand our changing world if we are attentive to them - the 'statistical panic' produced by the risk society, with its numerical portents of disease and mortality; the rage prompted by impenetrable and bloated bureaucracies; the brutal shame experienced by those caught in the crossfire of the media; and the conservative compassion that is not an emotion at all, only an empty political slogan. The orbit of Statistical Panic is wide, drawing in feminist theory, critical phenomenology, and recent theories of the emotions. But at its heart are stories. As an antidote to the vacuous dramas of media culture, with their mock emotions and scattershot sensations, Woodward turns to the autobiographical narrative in particular. Stories of illness - by Joan Didion, Yvonne Rainer, Paul Monette, and Alice Wexler, among others - receive special attention, with the inexhaustible emotion of grief framing the book as a whole.

Revue de presse :

"Kathleen Woodward has written a clear, impassioned, and theoretically sophisticated argument that bridges the conceptual gulf separating psychoanalytical explanations for emotion from other models--most notably, Raymond Williams's "structures of feeling"--that assume emotion is cultural in origin and susceptible to historical change. In a sequence of compelling examples--beginning with the anger characterizing first-wave feminists and peaking in what she calls "bureaucratic anger"this book sets opposing concepts of emotion in a dialectic that reveals their interdependence. Woodward makes a powerful case, on the one hand, that the emotional intensities held responsible for a perceived 'waning of affect' during the twentieth-century may also provide a basis for new affective communities. Looking at emotion through the lens of contemporary culture, she also persuades me to see the emotion we come to share through the intimacy of literary autobiography as translations of the intensities generated by an intricately bureaucratized, mass-mediated society." --Nancy Armstrong, Duke University

"Feelings have political consequences. Statistical Panic offers complexly layered readings of writers whose works have exposed the intimate connections between private sorrows and contemporary social realities, memoir and public policy, autobiography and theory: Joan Didion's portrait of grief, Freud's and Woolf's anatomies of anger, Paul Monette's affecting narrative of lives lost to AIDS, Morrison's searing exposure of racial injustice. Kathleen Woodward has created a compassionate criticism for our post-September 11 world." --Nancy K. Miller, author of But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Duke University Press
• Date d'édition: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0822343770
• ISBN 13: 9780822343776
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 330