Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture
Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture
Mainstream news and social media often highlight presentations of pain that invite a voyeuristic, pleasurable experience, whether the result of war, disasters, crime, accidents, or other catastrophes. This collection of essays explores pleasurable pains and painful pleasures, showing how they pervade contemporary western public culture.
Deploying methodologies drawn from psychoanalysis, rhetoric and communication, political theory, and visual culture, Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture offers insightful criticisms and theories about how pleasure and pain function in public discourse, media, and everyday communication practices.
The contributors provide a sample of fascinating range of news reportage, television, film and cinema, stage drama, comic performances, street art, and other forms of popular culture. The media cited and analyzed include Spike Lee’s films, Afrofuturism, autoethnography, and the #MeToo movement.
The collection takes up engrossing topics such as the cathartic allure of pain, ethical dilemmas surrounding public displays of suffering, and the transformative power of narratives that confront trauma. The essays also draw connections between theory and real-world outcomes, explore the implications of enjoying traumatic comedy, and link the natural world to otherwise mundane instances of interspecies violence. Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination hearings and what they suggest about witnessing trauma is also discussed.
Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture will change how a reader sees the world. It imparts a startling vision of western culture permeated by pain and pleasure.
This collection provokes lively debates. The chapters have a shared interest in analyzing the apparent opposites of ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ as mutually reinforcing elements constitutive of a conflicted contemporary reality.’ —Vanessa Meikle Schulman, author of Work Sights: The Visual Culture of Industry in Nineteenth-Century America
Christopher J. Gilbert is associate professor of English in Communication and Media at Assumption University and author of Caricature and National Character: The United States at War and When Comedy Goes Wrong. His work has also appeared in numerous journals.
John Louis Lucaites is professor emeritus of Rhetoric and Public Culture at Indiana University. He is author, coauthor, and editor of many works, most recently, The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship, coauthored with Robert Hariman.
A Note from the Editors
Introduction: On the Conditions of Pleasure and Pain by Christopher J. Gilbert and John Louis Lucaites
Chapter 1. Rhetorical Ecologies of Violent Care: Thinking with Spotted Lanternflies by Joshua Trey Barnett
Chapter 2. War, Satyriasis, and the Comic Pain of Gun Violence in Chi-Raq by Christopher J. Gilbert and John Louis Lucaites
Chapter 3. Shark Party: Trauma Scripts and the Comic Personae of Anthony Jeselnik by Kristen E. Hoerl and Casey Ryan Kelly
Chapter 4. The Texture of Pain: Haptic Visuality, Public Spectatorship, and Compassion in Documentary Photography by W. Patrick Wade
Chapter 5. Negotiating the Kairotic Norms of Trauma: The Kavanaugh Hearings and #WhyIDidntReport by Valerie N. Wieskamp
Chapter 6. A Child Is Being Trafficked: The Figuration of Child Abuse and Desire in Right-Wing Extremist Discourses by Calum Lister Matheson
Chapter 7. Pain, Pleasure, and the Mirror of Enjoyment by Atilla Hallsby and Joshua Gunn
Chapter 8. Owning Up: This White Woman Critic Needs to Do Better by Claire Sisco King
Epilogue: Who Are You to Have This Affect? by Rebecca Wanzo
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
Reframing Rhetorical History
Cases, Theories, and Methodologies
Edited by Kathleen J. Turner and Jason Edward Black; Preface by Kathleen J. Turner; Introduction by Jason Edward Black
Feminist Connections
Rhetoric and Activism across Time, Space, and Place
Edited by Katherine Fredlund, Kerri Hauman, and Jessica Ouellette; Foreword by Tarez Samra Graban; Afterword by Kristine L. Blair
The Practice of Rhetoric
Poetics, Performance, Philosophy
Edited by Debra Hawhee and Vessela Valiavitcharska
