Includes bibliographical references (p. 253-267) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: Affect and the movies : The significance of affect ; A theory of affect at the movies ; In defense of films ; Spectators and roles: a brief note on terminology -- 1. Pleasures, desires, fantasies : Movie pleasures ; Cognitive play ; Visceral experience ; Sympathy, antipathy, and parasocial engagement ; Narrative scenarios and emotional satisfactions ; Reflexive and social pleasures ; The multiple pleasures of the spectator ; Movie desires ; Movies as fantasies ; Movies and dreams -- 2. Movies and emotions : Automaticity and the psychological unconscious ; What is emotion? ; A cognitive-perceptual approach ; Basic concepts and terms ; Emotions inside and outside the movie theater ; The paradox of fiction ; Play and the regulation of emotion ; Kinds of emotion ; Direct, sympathetic/antipathetic, artifact, and meta-emotions ; Memory traces and associations ; Summary: emotions at the movies -- 3. Stories and sympathies : Affective prefocusing ; Paradigm scenarios ; Primary emotions and the movies ; Hollywood and the new Hollywood ; Narrative and character ; Classical narrative structure and emotion ; Character engagement ; Character goals and engagement ; The structure of engagement ; Character engagement and spectator difference ; What character engagement is: a summary -- 4. The sensual medium : Seeing and hearing movies ; Film and the body ; Direct affect ; Representing emotional experience ; Affective mimicry ; Mimicry and the face ; Mimicry and the body ; Music, sound, and affect ; Affect and contemporary Hollywood style -- 5. Affective trajectories and synesthesia : Narrative focus ; Character goals and narration ; Synesthetic affect and fittingness ; Narrative scenarios and synesthetic affect ; Shame, guilt, and the Spectator ; Shame and guilt as meta-emotions ; Shame/guilt scenarios and synesthetic affect ; Four parameters of affective trajectories -- 6. Negative emotions and sympathetic narratives : Sympathetic and distanced narratives ; The paradox of negative emotions ; Hume on the paradox of tragedy ; Catharsis? ; Managing the negative emotions ; The spillover effect ; Fantasies of assurance and control ; Ideology in sympathetic and distanced narratives -- 7. The rhetoric of emotion: disgust and beyond : The affective rhetoric of film ; The case of disgust ; Disgust defined ; The rise of movie disgust ; The nature of movie disgust ; The rhetoric of movie disgust ; Polyester and ironic disgust ; The rhetoric of emotion in film -- Conclusion: Moving viewers.
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