Synopses & Reviews
This book shows that to live in the modern world is to live in a culture of sensation.By the early nineteenth century murder had become the staple of the sensationalizing popular press, and gruesome descriptions were deployed to make a direct impact on the sensation of the reader. Later, concern with the thrills, spills, and shocks of modern life was being articulated in the language of sensation, and media sensationalism was already being seen both as contributing to this process and as magnifying its impact. Film, in turn, can be said to embody sensation in its very mode of operation. And all this has proved intensely controversial. Does the sensationalism of modern experience distort our capacity for understanding events and for rational and responsible reaction to them? When disasters can look indistinguishable from scenes in disaster movies, can we tell truth from fiction, and is the impact of the former diminished?This book explores the centrality of sensation to modernity and explores its contemporary implications, drawing on the ideas of Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze to develop a distinctive cultural framework. The book is illustrated with examples from literature, film, art and other cultural resources.
Synopsis
Under what conditions does 'sensation' become 'sensational'?
By the early nineteenth century murder had become the staple of the sensationalizing popular press, and gruesome descriptions were deployed to make a direct impact on the 'sensations' of the reader. Later, concern with the thrills, spills, and shocks of modern life was being articulated in the language of sensation, and media sensationalism was already being seen both as contributing to this process and as magnifying its impact, just as sensation was, in turn, taken up by literature, art and film. Finally, it seems as though the dramatization of these experiences in an era of media panics over terrorism, paedophilia, etc, has taken an overtly melodramatic form, in which battles of good and evil play out across the landscapes of our lives.
Sensational Subjects develops an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to exploring these themes, their impact and their implications for understanding the modern world.
About the Author
John Jervis is Research Fellow in Cultural Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. 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).
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Guest Preface
1. Introduction
2. Sensation and Sensationalism
3. Sensational Processes
4. The Aesthetics of Sensation
5. The Distraction of the Modern
6. Cinematic Sensation: the Sublime and the Spectacle
7. Sensational Affect
8. The Melodrama of the Modern
Notes
Index