Gerhard Hoffman and Alfred Hornung, eds., Emotion and Postmodernism
(Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 1997). iv + 439 pages.
These twenty-two essays on American culture, collected from participants at a
conference held at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, offer numerous
theoretical perspectives and critical insights for historians of American
"This is
a very good volume, rich in understanding, provocative, and translatable
directly to the study of American religions."
religions. By analyzing the ways in which emotion is represented, practiced,
undermined, and continuously redefined in American culture -- sometimes with
specific references to religious matters -- the contributions to this
collection help to map a terrain that is of increasing importance to religious
historians. Noel Carroll reviews theories about linkages between emotions and
morality. Rüdiger Kunow discusses the seeming
repression of emotion in Holocaust writings by Wiesel, Spiegelman, and
Kosinski. Gerhard Hoffman brilliantly outlines the matrices linking character,
desire, emotion, and action in the postmodern American novel. Along the way,
essays on emotion and skyscrapers, the Grand Canyon, and Maxine Hong Kingston's
works explore themes relevant to much recent religious historiography, and
the collection concludes with an excellent theoretical overview of the
"fear of savages," by Edith Wyschogrod. Some of these essays explicitly
criticize Frederic Jameson's celebrated definition of postmodernism as a
cultural movement involving the "waning of affect," and Jean-François Lyotard's absolute distinction between
cognition and feeling. The essays as a whole tilt towards philosophy and
theory, and literature, with historical insights interwoven throughout. This is
a very good volume, rich in understanding, provocative, and translatable
directly to the study of American religions.
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