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.
This is traced back to the inheritance of the eighteenth century, enabling us to identify a distinctive 'spectacle of sympathy' in which sympathy seems inherently to entail 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 – hence stimulating controversy, but also the exploration of the vicarious dimensions of modern experience so central to modern literature, art and culture. The implications of all this are further explored in the context of current debates over the display of trauma as the language of sympathetic engagement, and the alleged prevalence of 'compassion fatigue' in the era of media sensationalism.
Overall, the book uncovers the patterns that both reproduce our capacity for 'sympathetic sentiments' while revealing the inherent underlying tensions.
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vi | |
| A Note to the Reader |
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vii | |
| Acknowledgements |
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viii | |
| Foreword |
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ix | |
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1 | (16) |
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17 | (32) |
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3 Sensibility and Sympathy in the Theatre of Tears |
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49 | (36) |
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85 | (26) |
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5 From Sensibility to Affect? |
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111 | (24) |
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6 Unconscious Arts of Memory |
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135 | (28) |
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163 | (28) |
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8 Sympathy, Sentiment and Media Spectacle |
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191 | (24) |
| Postscript: Empathy, Spectacle and Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia |
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215 | (6) |
| Notes |
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221 | (46) |
| Index |
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267 | |
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).
