Banned Emotions

"Otis brings her training as a neuroscientist and literary scholar to the study of the influence that metaphors have on the experience and understanding of what she calls "banned emotions," those emotions considered harmful to the person who possesses them, others nearby, and society at large. Beginning with an extraordinarily lucid examination of the metaphors employed by or hidden in the theories of classic and modern students of emotion, she shows how emotions are seen as "hijacking reason," "impeding our forward movement," and "spreading like diseases." She draws her analysis to a close with a wonderfully enlightening consideration of the metaphors of emotion regulation in which she reveals the gendered, political, economic, and religious roots of such metaphors, more than a few of which target various forms of inequality and the imperatives of social justice. Outstanding." * Choice *
An overwhelmed freshman tells me that she feels that she ought not to dump her emotions on others, and I realize for the first time, with shock, what view of human interiority this metaphor implies. This is what Laura Otiss powerful new book does to you. It stops you in your tracks, making you aware of how metaphors that we casually use to describe various unloved emotions, shape our self-perception, daily interactions, the novels that we read and the movies that we watch. It takes a scholar of Otiss brilliance and wide-ranging interdisciplinary expertise to bring together cognitive science and literary and film criticism in ways that can change how we think and live. * Lisa Zunshine, Bush-Holbrook Professor of English, University of Kentucky and author of Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture *