Books at Duke University Press

Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions
Kathleen Woodward

336 pages (January 2009)

Cloth - $84.95	0-8223-4354-1
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4354-7]

Paperback - $23.95	0-8223-4377-0
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4377-6]

In this moving and thoughtful book, Kathleen Woodward explores the politics and poetics of the emotions, focusing on American culture since the 1960s. She argues that we are constrained in terms of gender, race, and age by our culture’s scripts for “emotional” behavior and that the accelerating impoverishment of interiority is a symptom of our increasingly media-saturated culture. She also shows how we can be empowered by stories that express our experience, revealing the value of our emotions as a crucial form of intelligence.

Referring discreetly to her own experience, Woodward examines the interpenetration of social structures and subjectivity, considering how psychological emotions are social phenomena, with feminist anger, racial shame, old-age depression, and sympathy for non-human cyborgs (including robots) as key cases in point. She discusses how emerging institutional and discursive structures engender “new” affects that in turn can help us understand our changing world if we are attentive to them—the “statistical panic” produced by the risk society, with its numerical portents of disease and mortality; the rage prompted by impenetrable and bloated bureaucracies; the brutal shame experienced by those caught in the crossfire of the media; and the conservative compassion that is not an emotion at all, only an empty political slogan.

The orbit of Statistical Panic is wide, drawing in feminist theory, critical phenomenology, and recent theories of the emotions. But at its heart are stories. As an antidote to the vacuous dramas of media culture, with its mock emotions and scattershot sensations, Woodward turns to the autobiographical narrative. Stories of illness—by Joan Didion, Yvonne Rainer, Paul Monette, and Alice Wexler, among others—receive special attention, with the inexhaustible emotion of grief framing the book as a whole.

“Kathleen Woodward has written a clear, impassioned, and theoretically sophisticated argument that bridges the conceptual gulf separating psychoanalytical explanations for emotion from other models—most notably, Raymond Williams’s ‘structures of feeling’—that assume emotion is cultural in origin and susceptible to historical change. In a sequence of compelling examples—beginning with the anger characterizing first-wave feminists and peaking in what she calls ‘bureaucratic rage’—this book sets opposing concepts of emotion in a dialectic that reveals their interdependence. Woodward makes a powerful case, on the one hand, that the emotional intensities held responsible for a perceived ‘waning of affect’ during the twentieth century may also provide a basis for new affective communities. On the other hand, by looking at emotion through the lens of contemporary culture, she persuades me to see the emotions we come to share through the intimacy of literary autobiography as translations of the intensities generated by an intricately bureaucratized, mass-mediated society.”—Nancy Armstrong, Duke University

“Feelings have political consequences. Statistical Panic offers complexly layered readings of writers whose works have exposed the intimate connections between private sorrows and contemporary social realities, memoir and public policy, autobiography and theory: Joan Didion’s portrait of grief, Freud’s and Woolf’s anatomies of anger, Paul Monette’s affecting narrative of lives lost to AIDS, Morrison’s searing exposure of racial injustice. Kathleen Woodward has created a compassionate criticism for our post-September 11 world.”—Nancy K. Miller, author of But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives

Kathleen Woodward is Professor of English at the University of Washington, where she directs the Simpson Center for the Humanities. She is the author of Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions and the editor of Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations and The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture.

See Reviews