Description
Book SynopsisReflections on how Americans are constrained by cultural scripts for age-, race-, and gender-proper emotional behavior and how our increasingly media-saturated culture impoverishes our interior lives.
Trade Review“. . .Woodward makes a valuable contribution to the study of popular culture. She exhaustively contextualizes her work in that of the technology and media scholars (in addition to the affective scholars) who have come before her, while still managing to add a new narrative all her own that clarifies her paradoxical approach.” - Caroline Hagood,
Journal of Popular Culture“The recent surge in interest in emotions from every imaginable discipline is richly explored in Kathleen Woodward’s lively new book,
Statistical Panic.” - Maura Spiegel,
American Literature“Woodward herself writes clearly in an almost ‘good-neighborly’ mode, and one can easily enough imagine talking with her over the backyard fence about life's difficulties. . . . The virtue of the book is clear: sociologists do not ‘own’ the ills of contemporary life in advanced societies, and when an English professor examines the same phenomena as do social scientists, but without the hindrances of methodological apparatus, genuinely useful notions become apparent that seldom make themselves known in conventional sociological research reports.” -
Contemporary Sociology“
Statistical Panic offers a critical exploration of emotions, how they are used for political gain, how they normatively reinforce social inequality, and how their subversion can combat the same inequalities. Woodward offers emotions as a source of political and social mobility, and her writing challenges us to be critical of the way statistical panic is used. She urges us complicate our understanding of our own emotional responses to everything from personal relationships to Twitter feeds.” - Lizzy Shramko,
Feminist Review blog
“If this reviewer were to recommend one current book to those in the emotion-science community, it would be this marvelous, wise collection of essays. Although nominally a work of literary and cultural criticism, the volume provides those interested in emotion in any discipline with a fresh exploration of the intersection of culture, emotions, and technology. . . . A deeply humane, gracefully written work of keen intelligence, this book is a critical resource for those interested in understanding emotions as represented in literature and as lived in daily life and in investigating what emotions reveal about human nature. Essential.” - R. R. Cornelius,
Choice“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“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 rage’—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. On the other hand, by looking at emotion through the lens of contemporary culture, she persuades me to see the emotions 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
“[W]oodward makes a valuable contribution to the study of popular culture. She exhaustively contextualizes her work in that of the technology and media scholars (in addition to the affective scholars) who have come before her, while still managing to add a new narrative all her own that clarifies her paradoxical approach.” -- Caroline Hagood * Journal of Popular Culture *
“
Statistical Panic offers a critical exploration of emotions, how they are used for political gain, how they normatively reinforce social inequality, and how their subversion can combat the same inequalities. Woodward offers emotions as a source of political and social mobility, and her writing challenges us to be critical of the way statistical panic is used. She urges us complicate our understanding of our own emotional responses to everything from personal relationships to Twitter feeds.” -- Lizzy Shramko * Feminist Review blog *
“If this reviewer were to recommend one current book to those in the emotion-science community, it would be this marvelous, wise collection of essays. Although nominally a work of literary and cultural criticism, the volume provides those interested in emotion in any discipline with a fresh exploration of the intersection of culture, emotions, and technology. . . . A deeply humane, gracefully written work of keen intelligence, this book is a critical resource for those interested in understanding emotions as represented in literature and as lived in daily life and in investigating what emotions reveal about human nature. Essential.” -- R. R. Cornelius * Choice *
“The recent surge in interest in emotions from every imaginable discipline is richly explored in Kathleen Woodward’s lively new book,
Statistical Panic.” -- Maura Spiegel * American Literature *
“Woodward herself writes clearly in an almost ‘good-neighborly’ mode, and one can easily enough imagine talking with her over the backyard fence about life's difficulties. . . . The virtue of the book is clear: sociologists do not ‘own’ the ills of contemporary life in advanced societies, and when an English professor examines the same phenomena as do social scientists, but without the hindrances of methodological apparatus, genuinely useful notions become apparent that seldom make themselves known in conventional sociological research reports.” * Contemporary Sociology *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction: Thinking Feeling, Feeling Thinking 1
Part One: Cultural Politics, Communities of Feeling 29
1. Containing Anger, Advocating Anger: Freud and Feminism 35
2. Against Wisdom: Anger and Aging 58
3. Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame 79
4. Liberal Compassion, Compassionate Conservatism 109
Part Two: Structures of Feeling, "New" Feelings 135
5. Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs 139
6. Bureaucratic Rage 165
7. Statistical Panic 195
Coda: Inexhaustible Grief 219
Notes 235
Bibliography 275
Index 297
