Ebook: Uncomfortable Situations: Emotion between Science and the Humanities

What is a hostile environment? How exactly can feelings be mixed? What on earth might it mean when someone writes that he was “happily situated” as a slave? The answers, of course, depend uponwhomyou ask.

Science and the humanities typically offer two different paradigms for thinking about emotion—the first rooted in brain and biology, the second in a social world. With rhetoric as a field guide, Uncomfortable Situations establishescommon groundbetween these two paradigms, focusing on a theory of situated emotion.Daniel M. Gross anchors the argument in Charles Darwin, whose work on emotion has been misunderstood across the disciplinesas it has beenshoehorned into the perceivedscience-humanities divide.Then Gross turns to sentimental literature as the single best domain for studying emotional situations. There’s lost composure (Sterne), bearing up (Equiano), environmental hostility (Radcliffe), and feeling mixed (Austen). Rounding out the book, an epiloguewritten with ecological neuroscientist Stephanie Preston provides a different kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration. Uncomfortable Situations is a conciliatory work across science and the humanities—a groundbreaking model for future studies.