States of Sentiment: The Cultural Politics of Emotions - Hardcover

Pramod K. Nayar

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 8125041990 ISBN 13: 9788125041993

Publisher: Orient Blackswan, 2011

Synopsis

States of Sentiment, a fascinating merger of cultural studies with philosophy, psychology and trauma studies, analyses how sentiments of care, passion, desire, pleasure, fear, sympathy or pity are discursively commodified (made a commodity) in the mass media, films, reportage and the other public culture forms. It demonstrates that cultures today are becoming emotion-driven, and that there are crucial social dimensions to our responses to various situations, events and representations. Organised around four sentiments well-being, suffering, aversion and hope and analysing contemporary cultural events and icons, the book unravels the representational strategies, cultural codes and discourses that inform, and even determine the appropriateness or inappropriateness of our emotional responses.

About this title

About the Author:

Pramod K. Nayar is Lecturer, Department of English, University of Hyderabad

Review:

Pramod Nayar s States of Sentiment represents a fascinating merger of Cultural Studies with Philosophy, Psychology, and Trauma Studies through the overarching category of Affect. The book is filled with the emotional style that Nayar explores, and readers recognise the influence of culturally-coded images and narratives in the creation of real emotions and conceptions of happiness, suffering, aversion, and hope. Broadly appealing and creative, Nayar s text connects with readers, thanks to his well-chosen examples (mostly from American and Indian public culture) and easy way of inserting himself into the text. Nayar offers a way to critically consider the effects of a continuous barrage of mediated and emotionally-charged content without dismissing the media as toying with people s emotions and loyalties in order to manipulating viewers. Rather, he posits that the media can have a positive role to play; by transforming trauma into fictional melodrama, kitsch can make history consumable. While recognising that there is a generalised trend toward affective indifference as we are inundated with images of suffering, Nayar also sees a space being opened for voluntary work and interventions based on sympathy. The book ends on a hopeful note, assigning real consequences in terms of both emotions and actions to the ideas and narratives encountered in public culture. --Kristen Rudisill, Department of Popular Culture, Bowling Green State University, USA

We live in a world in which expressions such as globalization , the increased pace of life , the knowledge revolution , media saturation , and compassion fatigue are so familiar as to be banal. Our senses and our emotions are overloaded and still we seem to have more and more access to emotionally intense events and stimuli that are increasingly packaged as commodities. Taking cues from Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall s views of culture as respectively structures of feeling and feelings, attachments and emotions as well as concepts and ideas Pramod Nayar in this impressive work of cultural studies unpacks the discursive fields of emotion.... But this is no jeremiad of a bereft culture. Rather States of Sentiment points to an affective turn in public culture that contains within it hope, that is emotion generated through the imagination of possibilities . It is a bracing study, but one that offers a way out of the dead-end of despair in our highly commodified world. --Ian Lewis Gordon, Department of History, National University of Singapore

We live in a world in which expressions such as globalization , the increased pace of life , the knowledge revolution , media saturation , and compassion fatigue are so familiar as to be banal. Our senses and our emotions are overloaded and still we seem to have more and more access to emotionally intense events and stimuli that are increasingly packaged as commodities. Taking cues from Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall s views of culture as respectively structures of feeling and feelings, attachments and emotions as well as concepts and ideas Pramod Nayar in this impressive work of cultural studies unpacks the discursive fields of emotion.... But this is no jeremiad of a bereft culture. Rather States of Sentiment points to an affective turn in public culture that contains within it hope, that is emotion generated through the imagination of possibilities . It is a bracing study, but one that offers a way out of the dead-end of despair in our highly commodified world. --Ian Lewis Gordon, Department of History, National University of Singapore

About this edition

• Publisher: Orient Blackswan
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 8125041990
• ISBN 13: 9788125041993
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 316