A Feeling of Wrongness
eBook - PDF

A Feeling of Wrongness

Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

A Feeling of Wrongness

Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture

About this book

In A Feeling of Wrongness, Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman confront the rhetorical challenge inherent in the concept of pessimism by analyzing how it is represented in an eclectic range of texts on the fringes of popular culture, from adult animated cartoons to speculative fiction.

Packer and Stoneman explore how narratives such as True Detective, Rick and Morty, Final Fantasy VII, Lovecraftian weird fiction, and the pop ideology of transhumanism are better suited to communicate pessimistic affect to their fans than most carefully argued philosophical treatises and polemics. They show how these popular nondiscursive texts successfully circumvent the typical defenses against pessimism identified by Peter Wessel Zapffe as distraction, isolation, anchoring, and sublimation. They twist genres, upend common tropes, and disturb conventional narrative structures in a way that catches their audience off guard, resulting in belief without cognition, a more rhetorically effective form of pessimism than philosophical pessimism.

While philosophers and polemicists argue for pessimism in accord with the inherently optimistic structures of expressive thought or rhetoric, Packer and Stoneman show how popular texts are able to communicate their pessimism in ways that are paradoxically freed from the restrictive tools of optimism. A Feeling of Wrongness thus presents uncharted rhetorical possibilities for narrative, making visible the rhetorical efficacy of alternate ways and means of persuasion.

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Yes, you can access A Feeling of Wrongness by Joseph Packer,Ethan Stoneman in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Popular Culture in Art. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. COVER front
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Table of Contents
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. Introduction
  6. Notes to Introduction
  7. Chapter 1: “No, Everything Is Not All Right:" Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic
  8. Notes to Chapter 1
  9. Chapter 2: “I’m Bad at Parties:” The Philosophical Pessimism of True Detective
  10. Notes to Chapter 2
  11. Chapter 3: “Wubba Lubba Dub-Dub!” The Tragicomic Pessimism of Rick and Morty
  12. Notes to Chapter 3
  13. Chapter 4: "Finish Her:" The Interactive Pessimism of Final Fantasy VII
  14. Notes to Chapter 4
  15. Chapter 5: "All Hope Abandon:" Transhumanism’s Hidden Hellscape
  16. Notes to Chapter 5
  17. Conclusion: Pessimism Never Won Any Battles?
  18. Notes to Conclusion
  19. Notes
  20. Bibliography
  21. Index