Download or read book Paradoxes of Emotion and Fiction written by Robert J. Yanal and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-07-08 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we experience real emotions when viewing a movie or reading a novel or watching a play when we know the characters whose actions have this effect on us do not exist? This is a conundrum that has puzzled philosophers for a long time, and in this book Robert Yanal both canvasses previously proposed solutions to it and offers one of his own. First formulated by Samuel Johnson, the paradox received its most famous answer from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who advised his readers to engage in a "willing suspension of disbelief." More recently, philosophers have argued that we are irrational in emoting toward fiction, or that we do not emote toward fiction but rather toward factual counterparts, or that we do not have real but only quasi-emotion toward fiction, generated by our playing games of make-believe. All of these proposed solutions are critically reviewed. Finding these answers unsatisfactory, Yanal offers an alternative, providing a new version of what has been dubbed "thought theory." On this theory, mere thoughts not believed true are seen as the functional equivalent of belief at least insofar as stimulating emotion is concerned. The emoter's disbelief in the actuality of components of the thoughts must be rendered relatively inactive. Such emotion is real and typically has the character of being richly generated yet unconsummated. The book extends this theory also to resolving other paradoxes arising from emotional response to fiction: how we feel suspense over what comes next in a story even when we are re-reading it for a second or third time; and how we take pleasure in narratives, such as tragedy, that excite unpleasant emotions such as fear, pity, or horror.
Download or read book Resolving the Paradoxes of Emotion and Fiction a Study of Our Emotional Engagement with Fictional Characters written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Paradox of Emotion and Fiction written by Heather Katrina Matula and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Paradoxes of Art written by Alan Paskow and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-15 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, Alan Paskow first asks why fictional characters, such as Hamlet and Anna Karenina, matter to us and how they are able to emotionally affect us. He then applies these questions to painting, demonstrating that paintings beckon us to view their contents as real. What we visualise in paintings, he argues, is not simply in our heads but in our world. Paskow also situates the phenomenological approach to the experience of painting in relation to methodological assumptions and claims in analytic aesthetics as well as in contemporary schools of thought, particularly Marxist, feminist, and deconstructionist.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Horror written by Noel Carroll and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noel Carroll, film scholar and philosopher, offers the first serious look at the aesthetics of horror. In this book he discusses the nature and narrative structures of the genre, dealing with horror as a "transmedia" phenomenon. A fan and serious student of the horror genre, Carroll brings to bear his comprehensive knowledge of obscure and forgotten works, as well as of the horror masterpieces. Working from a philosophical perspective, he tries to account for how people can find pleasure in having their wits scared out of them. What, after all, are those "paradoxes of the heart" that make us want to be horrified?
Download or read book Strange Fits of Passion written by Adela Pinch and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contends that when late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers sought to explain the origins of emotions, they often discovered that their feelings may not really have been their own. It explores the paradoxes of representing feelings in philosophy, aesthetic theory, gender ideology, literature, and popular sentimentality, and it argues that this periods obsession with sentimental, wayward emotion was inseparable from the dilemmas resulting from attempts to locate the origins of feelings in experience. The book shows how these epistemological dilemmas became gendered by studying a series of extravagantly affective scenes: Humes extraordinary confession of his own melancholy in the Treatise of Human Nature; Charlotte Smiths insistence that she really feels the gloomy feelings portrayed in her Elegiac Sonnets; Wordsworths witnessing of a woman poet reading and weeping; tearful exchanges between fathers and daughters in the gothic novel; the climactic debate over the strengths of mens and womens feelings in Jane Austens Persuasion; and the poetic and public mourning of a dead princess in 1817.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion written by Patrick Colm Hogan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion shows how the "affective turn" in the humanities applies to literary studies. Deftly combining the scientific elements with the literary, the book provides a theoretical and topical introduction to reading literature and emotion. Looking at a variety of formats, including novels, drama, film, graphic fiction, and lyric poetry, the book also includes focus on specific authors such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. The volume introduces the theoretical groundwork, covering such categories as affect theory, affective neuroscience, cognitive science, evolution, and history of emotions. It examines the range of emotions that play a special role in literature, including happiness, fear, aesthetic delight, empathy, and sympathy, as well as aspects of literature (style, narrative voice, and others) that bear on emotional response. Finally, it explores ethical and political concerns that are often intertwined with emotional response, including racism, colonialism, disability, ecology, gender, sexuality, and trauma. This is a crucial guide to the ways in which new, interdisciplinary understandings of emotion and affect—in fields from neuroscience to social theory—are changing the study of literature and of the ways those new understandings are impacted by work on literature also.
Download or read book Molecules of Emotion written by Candace B. Pert and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1997 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Molecules of Emotion is a landmark work, full of insight and wisdom and possessing that rare power to change the way we see the world and ourselves.
Download or read book Engaging Characters written by Murray Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-12 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Characters - those fictional agents populating the fictional worlds we spend so much time absorbed in - are ubiquitous in our lives. We track their fortunes, judge their actions, and respond to them with anger, amusement, and affection - indeed the whole palette of human emotions. Powerfully drawn characters transcend their stories, entering into our imaginations and deliberations about the actual world, acting as analogies and points of reference. And yet there has been remarkably little sustained and systematic reflection on these creatures that absorb so much of our attention and emotional lives. In Engaging Characters, Murray Smith sets out a comprehensive analysis of character, exploring the role of characters in our experience of narrative and fiction. Smith's analysis focuses on film, and also illuminates character in literature, opera, song, cartoons, new and social media. At the heart of this account is an explanation of the capacity of characters to move us. Teasing out the various dimensions of character, Smith explores the means by which films draw us close to characters, or hold us at a distance from them, and how our beliefs and attitudes are formed and sometimes reformed by these encounters. Integrating these arguments with research on emotion in philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, and anthropology, Engaging Characters advances an account of the nature of fictional characters and their functions in fiction, imagination, and human experience. In this revised, twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Engaging Characters, Smith refines and extends the arguments of the first edition, with a substantial new introduction reviewing the debates on emotion, empathy, and film spectatorship that the book has inspired.
Download or read book Engaging the Moving Image written by Noel Carroll and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noël Carroll, a brilliant and provocative philosopher of film, has gathered in this book eighteen of his most recent essays on cinema and television—what Carroll calls “moving images.” The essays discuss topics in philosophy, film theory, and film criticism. Drawing on concepts from cognitive psychology and analytic philosophy, Carroll examines a wide range of fascinating topics. These include film attention, the emotional address of the moving image, film and racism, the nature and epistemology of documentary film, the moral status of television, the concept of film style, the foundations of film evaluation, the film theory of Siegfried Kracauer, the ideology of the professional western, and films by Sergei Eisenstein and Yvonne Rainer. Carroll also assesses the state of contemporary film theory and speculates on its prospects. The book continues many of the themes of Carroll’s earlier work Theorizing the Moving Image and develops them in new directions. A general introduction by George Wilson situates Carroll’s essays in relation to his view of moving-image studies.
Download or read book Emotions and Understanding written by Y. Gustafsson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-11-27 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique collection of articles on emotion by Wittgensteinian philosophers provides a fresh perspective on the questions framing the current philosophical and scientific debates about emotions and offers significant insights into the role of emotions for understanding interpersonal relations and the relation between emotion and ethics.
Download or read book The Paradox of Choice written by Barry Schwartz and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether we're buying a pair of jeans, ordering a cup of coffee, selecting a long-distance carrier, applying to college, choosing a doctor, or setting up a 401(k), everyday decisions—both big and small—have become increasingly complex due to the overwhelming abundance of choice with which we are presented. As Americans, we assume that more choice means better options and greater satisfaction. But beware of excessive choice: choice overload can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them, it can set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures. In the long run, this can lead to decision-making paralysis, anxiety, and perpetual stress. And, in a culture that tells us that there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are limitless, too much choice can lead to clinical depression. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains at what point choice—the hallmark of individual freedom and self-determination that we so cherish—becomes detrimental to our psychological and emotional well-being. In accessible, engaging, and anecdotal prose, Schwartz shows how the dramatic explosion in choice—from the mundane to the profound challenges of balancing career, family, and individual needs—has paradoxically become a problem instead of a solution. Schwartz also shows how our obsession with choice encourages us to seek that which makes us feel worse. By synthesizing current research in the social sciences, Schwartz makes the counter intuitive case that eliminating choices can greatly reduce the stress, anxiety, and busyness of our lives. He offers eleven practical steps on how to limit choices to a manageable number, have the discipline to focus on those that are important and ignore the rest, and ultimately derive greater satisfaction from the choices you have to make.
Download or read book Good and Real written by Gary L. Drescher and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining a series of provocative paradoxes about consciousness, choice, ethics, and other topics, Good and Real tries to reconcile a purely mechanical view of the universe with key aspects of our subjective impressions of our own existence. In Good and Real, Gary Drescher examines a series of provocative paradoxes about consciousness, choice, ethics, quantum mechanics, and other topics, in an effort to reconcile a purely mechanical view of the universe with key aspects of our subjective impressions of our own existence. Many scientists suspect that the universe can ultimately be described by a simple (perhaps even deterministic) formalism; all that is real unfolds mechanically according to that formalism. But how, then, is it possible for us to be conscious, or to make genuine choices? And how can there be an ethical dimension to such choices? Drescher sketches computational models of consciousness, choice, and subjunctive reasoning--what would happen if this or that were to occur? --to show how such phenomena are compatible with a mechanical, even deterministic universe. Analyses of Newcomb's Problem (a paradox about choice) and the Prisoner's Dilemma (a paradox about self-interest vs. altruism, arguably reducible to Newcomb's Problem) help bring the problems and proposed solutions into focus. Regarding quantum mechanics, Drescher builds on Everett's relative-state formulation--but presenting a simplified formalism, accessible to laypersons--to argue that, contrary to some popular impressions, quantum mechanics is compatible with an objective, deterministic physical reality, and that there is no special connection between quantum phenomena and consciousness. In each of several disparate but intertwined topics ranging from physics to ethics, Drescher argues that a missing technical linchpin can make the quest for objectivity seem impossible, until the elusive technical fix is at hand.
Download or read book The Nature of Fiction written by Gregory Currie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990-10-26 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important book provides a theory about the nature of fiction, and about the relation between the author, the reader and the fictional text. The approach is philosophical: that is to say, the author offers an account of key concepts such as fictional truth, fictional characters, and fiction itself. The book argues that the concept of fiction can be explained partly in terms of communicative intentions, partly in terms of a condition which excludes relations of counterfactual dependence between the world and the text. This communicative model is then applied to the following problems: how can something be 'true in the story' without being explicitly stated in the text? In what ways does interpreting a fictional story depend upon grasping its author's intentions? Is there always a unique best interpretation of a fictional text? What is the correct semantics for fictional names? What is the nature of our emotional response to a fictional work? In answering these questions the author explores the complex interaction between author, reader, and text. This interaction requires the reader to construct a 'fictional author' - a character in the story whose personality, beliefs and emotional states must be interpreted if the reader is to grasp the meaning of the work.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Paradox written by Wendy K. Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of paradox dates back to ancient philosophy, yet only recently have scholars started to explore this idea in organizational phenomena. Two decades ago, a handful of provocative theorists urged researchers to take seriously the study of paradox, and thereby deepen our understanding of plurality, tensions, and contradictions in organizational life. Studies of organizational paradox have grown exponentially over the past two decades, canvassing varied phenomena, methods, and levels of analysis. These studies have explored such tensions as today and tomorrow, global integration and local distinctions, collaboration and competition, self and others, mission and markets. Yet even with both the depth and breadth of interest in organizational paradoxes, key issues around definitions and application remain. This handbook seeks to aid, engage, and fuel the expanding interest in organizational paradox. Contributions to this volume depict how paradox studies inform, and are informed, by other theoretical perspectives, while creating a resource that enables scholars to learn about and apply this lens across varied organizational phenomena. The increasing complexity, volatility, and ambiguity in our world continually surfaces paradoxical dynamics. Thus, this handbook offers insights to scholars across organizational theory.
Download or read book Literary Reading written by David S. Miall and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first major book in English on literary reading to be based on empirical methods. Moving the focus away from interpretation to the experience of literary texts, these studies demonstrate the role played by feeling in readers' responses, showing how feeling performs important functions during reading that cannot be accounted for by cognitive understanding. These studies not only reinvigorate the concept of literariness, they are also thoroughly interdisciplinary, offering a coherent approach to literary reading that draws on literary theory, psychology, neuropsychology, and evolutionary psychology. Several chapters help to introduce the empirical approach for students.
Download or read book Equivocation and the Paradox of Fiction written by Benjamin Patrick Brooks and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
