Sympathetic Sentiments
Affect, Emotion and Spectacle in the Modern World
1st Edition
Published on 29. January 2015
256 pages
978-1-4725-3561-0 (ISBN)
Description
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.
Sympathetic Sentiments develops an innovative interdisciplinary framework to explore the implications of living in a culture of feeling that seems ill at ease with itself, one in which sentiments are frequently denounced for being sentimental and self-indulgent.
These tensions are traced back to the inheritance of the eighteenth century, enabling us to identify a distinctive 'spectacle of sympathy', in which sympathy entails public forms of expression whereby being on show is both a condition of the authenticity of such affects and of their capacity to be masked and simulated. This, John Jervis suggests, is at the root of a range of controversies central to modern life, art and culture, including contemporary debates around trauma and compassion fatigue. Connected to these debates is the issue of modern sensationalism, discussed here and elaborated in a companion volume: Sensational Subjects: The Dramatization of Experience in the Modern World, which is published simultaneously by Bloomsbury.
Sympathetic Sentiments develops an innovative interdisciplinary framework to explore the implications of living in a culture of feeling that seems ill at ease with itself, one in which sentiments are frequently denounced for being sentimental and self-indulgent.
These tensions are traced back to the inheritance of the eighteenth century, enabling us to identify a distinctive 'spectacle of sympathy', in which sympathy entails public forms of expression whereby being on show is both a condition of the authenticity of such affects and of their capacity to be masked and simulated. This, John Jervis suggests, is at the root of a range of controversies central to modern life, art and culture, including contemporary debates around trauma and compassion fatigue. Connected to these debates is the issue of modern sensationalism, discussed here and elaborated in a companion volume: Sensational Subjects: The Dramatization of Experience in the Modern World, which is published simultaneously by Bloomsbury.
More details
Series
Edition
1. Auflage
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Target group
Professional and scholarly
ISBN-13
978-1-4725-3561-0 (9781472535610)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
01/2015
Bloomsbury Academic
€39.00
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
John Jervis is Research Fellow in Cultural Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. He is the author of Exploring the Modern: Patterns of Western Culture and Civilization (1998) and Transgressing the Modern: Explorations in the Western Experience of Otherness (2000) and the co-editor of Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties (2008).
Content
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Guest Preface
1. Introduction
2. Cloying Sentiments
3. Sensibility and Sympathy in the Theatre of Tears
4. Sympathy Theory
5. From Sensibility to Affect?
6. Unconscious Arts of Memory
7. Trauma Trouble
8. Sympathy, Sentiment and Media Spectacle
Postscript: Empathy, Spectacle and Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia
Notes
Index
List of Illustrations
Guest Preface
1. Introduction
2. Cloying Sentiments
3. Sensibility and Sympathy in the Theatre of Tears
4. Sympathy Theory
5. From Sensibility to Affect?
6. Unconscious Arts of Memory
7. Trauma Trouble
8. Sympathy, Sentiment and Media Spectacle
Postscript: Empathy, Spectacle and Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia
Notes
Index
