Statistical panic : cultural politics and poetics of the emotions / Kathleen Woodward.
Publication details: Durham, [NC] : Duke University Press, 2009.Description: xii, 316 p. ; 23 cmISBN:- 9780822343547 (cloth : alk. paper)
- 9780822343776 (pbk. : alk. paper)
- 152.4 22
- BF531 .W66 2009
Item type | Current library | Shelving location | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
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Book | NMC Library | Stacks | BF531 .W66 2009 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 33039001114452 |
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BF531 .O73 2014 Snakes, sunrises, and Shakespeare : how evolution shapes our loves and fears / | BF531 .P36 2012 The archaeology of mind : neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions / | BF531 .P67 2014 The positive side of negative emotions / | BF531 .W66 2009 Statistical panic : cultural politics and poetics of the emotions / | BF532 .A53 2012 Feelings and moods / | BF538 .K34 2007 What is emotion? : history, measures, and meanings / | BF561 .G65 1995 Emotional intelligence / |
Includes bibliographical references (p. [275]-295) and index.
Introduction: thinking feeling, feeling thinking -- Containing anger, advocating anger: Freud and feminism -- Against wisdom: anger and aging -- Racial shame, mass-mediated shame, mutual shame -- Liberal compassion, compassionate conservatism -- Sympathy for (nonhuman) cyborgs -- Bureaucratic rage -- Statistical panic -- Coda: inexhaustible grief.
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 its mock emotions and scattershot sensations, Woodward turns to the autobiographical narrative. 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. -- Publisher description.