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Thrillology: Affective Intensities And The Everyday-Spectacular In American Literature And Culture, Peter James Pappas

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“Thrillology: Affective Intensities and the Everyday-Spectacular in American Literature and Culture” presents thrill as a powerful thematic component centered on immediate affective gratification informing character development and narrative. This perspective rethinks theme as always having an affective dimension that accompanies its conceptual articulations, with the former, in many cases, being the more important element. Thrilled psycho-emotional states emerge, in their own right, as legitimizations of individuality and cultural autonomy from the perspective of the passional subject. Engaging with a broad spectrum of literary and cultural sources spanning the last hundred years, this project investigates various ways in which the self-fulfilling …