Sensational Subjects: The Dramatization of Experience in the Modern World

Abstract: A companion volume to Sympathetic Sentiments: Modernity and the Spectacle of Feeling (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Both volumes analyse the culture of sensationalism, as it has developed over the modern period, with particular reference to the role of ‘feeling’, and the performance of feeling, as aspects of individual experience and cultural identity. This volume constitutes a kind of theoretically-inflected cultural history of modern affect and emotion in relation to literature, popular culture, and the development of the mass media, since the eighteenth century. It explores the evolving relation between the two senses of ‘sensation’ – the mark of experience on the body, as ‘feeling’, and a spectacular, challenging event – in effect attempting to outline the conditions under which sensation does indeed become ‘sensational’.

This develops out of earlier work which explores ‘modernity as culture’, situating modernity in the context of everyday life as it reveals tensions between the ‘rational’, instrumental orientation to the world and our actual experience and consciousness of it. In a culture of sensationalism, this results in a simultaneous fragmentation and diffusion of modern experience, along with attempts to reassert control, whether through the rationalization of experience to measurable uniformity and its reproduction as simulation, or through a manic mobilization against threats characterized as breakdown, as evil, hence presenting us with a reconstituted sense of the world as a scene of melodrama. This latter manifestation of the culture of sensationalism in turn renders problematical the whole arena of morally-inflected public debate and the possibility of moral engagement with the plight of the other.