Sympathetic Sentiments: Affect, Emotion and Spectacle in the Modern World

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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.

Reviews

"This book is a timely addition to the sometimes bewilderingly broad field of scholarship on sentiment and sympathy. It is a lively and richly illustrated discussion of the ways in which humans feel, think, recall, and imagine others. It patiently guides the reader through the complex historical transformations and surprising conceptual continuities that characterize the ways in which these abilities - and their translation into ethical actions - have been theorized from the eighteenth century to the present day." --Carolyn Burdett, Senior Lecturer, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

"Thrillingly expansive in its imaginative reach, this book takes the culture of sensibility and offers to read it, not in history, but as intellectual history. Tracing the tense co-existence of sensation and sympathy from pre-Enlightenment through to contemporary media spectacles, Jervis draws artists, novelists, philosophers and political theorists into a rich conversation about how emotion, affect and sentimentality shape our everyday relations to others." --Misha Kavka, Media, Film and Television, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Author Bio

John Jervis is Research Fellow in Cultural Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury. 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).