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UCLA4U: OFF THE SHELF
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“The Book of The Heart” by Eric Jager (Chicago University Press) Instead of “making a mental note” to swing by the dry cleaners on your way home from work, are you more inclined in this digital day and age to put such a task “on your screen”? While such changes in everyday conversation may seem trivial, they actually reflect a profound but still largely overlooked shift in how we view ourselves, Eric Jager contends in a new book, “The Book of the Heart.” The associate professor of English has spent the past five years tracking the origins of scores of phrases describing the mind and mental activities. “A conceptual revolution in the cognitive sciences has enshrined the computer as the dominant metaphor for the human psyche, completing the break with a long tradition of textual metaphor that stretches back to antiquity,” he writes in “The Book of the Heart.” Marshalling scores of literary references going back 2,500 years, Jager traces the rise and fall of the practice of equating printed text — and the associated activities of reading and writing — with human character traits, moral values and mental processes. “ ‘Character’ and ‘impression’ are examples of words used in printing that have become closely identified with human consciousness,” he said. “They date back to ancient Greece and were first used to describe the act of writing on wax tablets, which were early precursors to notebooks. ‘Reading’ someone’s mind, ‘judging a book by its cover’ and ‘turning over a new leaf’ — these are turns of phrase that show just how deeply books have shaped our sense of who we are.” Over the ages, what Jager terms the “text-as-self” proved such a versatile symbol for mental activities that it embraced changing conceptions of consciousness, Jager found. — Meg Sullivan |
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“How Emotions Work,” by Jack Katz (University of Chicago Press)
In “How Emotions Work,” Professor of Sociology Jack Katz addresses how we can be moved so powerfully by hidden forces we barely understand. Studying vivid emotional experiences in natural everyday settings — people crying at weddings or road rage, for example — Katz provides insights into human behavior and shows how artfully we produce our emotions. Even a silent, single tear, he says, typically represents a profound experience, when we are moved to an unusual depth. “Tears are linked to what is precious in life; crying recognizes what is worthy of pride, what is awe-inspiring and inspirational” and often occurs when we cannot verbalize what we feel or mean. Adults cry silent tears to honor what is too sacred to capture with language.
Katz disputes that emotions are in tension with reason, as so often depicted.
To illustrate this, he shows how a murder suspect cries strategically to buy time under interrogation as the police present evidence that undermines his story. His crying is part of a desperate effort at self-preservation.
Taken together, these little everyday events, Katz argues, are “our concrete efforts to make sense of life at times when what we encounter goes beyond what seems sensible or reasonable. These little moments are falls in which we repeatedly relive the struggle to make personal sense of our lives and what we witness. This is what we shed silent tears about, what provokes us to abandon our calm and scream, indicating the limits of our efforts to live a controlled life.
“The challenge these everyday emotions present to us is, how will you respond to a fall? We all fall,” Katz says. “Often the self-portraits that we produce through our emotions are not what we want others to see of us, but this is the lived truth of our identities, day by day.” — Stuart Wolpert
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