Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Losing Our Cool? Following Williams And Grossberg On Emotions, E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D., Jennifer Harding

Faculty Works: COM (1993-2016)

Despite constituting a significant area of everyday experience, emotions have rarely been the focus of detailed investigation within cultural studies. This paper makes a case for viewing emotions as social/cultural/political, as well as individual, phenomena and reviews the contributions of cultural theorists to analyses of emotions. To this end, it critically examines Raymond Williams' concept ‘structure of feeling’, which reintroduces the subjective into the social, and Larry Grossberg's concept ‘economy of affect’, which seeks to explain how, through affective investments, ideologies are internalized and naturalized. Whilst both theorists provide important conceptual tools, each conceptualization has specific limitations and neither theorist …