A Feeling of Wrongness: Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture

by Joseph Packer, Ethan Stoneman

In A Feeling of Wrongness , Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman confront the rhetorical challenge inherent in the concept of pessimism by analyzing how it is represented in an eclectic range of texts on the fringes of popular culture, from adult animated cartoons to speculative fiction. Packer and Stoneman explore how narratives such as True Detective , Rick and Morty , Final Fantasy VII , Lovecraftian weird fiction, and the pop ideology of transhumanism are better suited to communicate pessimistic affect to their fans than most carefully argued philosophical treatises and polemics. They show how these popular nondiscursive texts successfully circumvent the typical defenses against pessimism identified by Peter Wessel Zapffe as distraction, isolation, anchoring, and sublimation. They twist genres, upend common tropes, and disturb conventional narrative structures in a way that catches their audience off guard, resulting in belief without cognition, a more rhetorically effective form of pessimism than philosophical pessimism. While philosophers and polemicists argue for pessimism in accord with the inherently optimistic structures of expressive thought or rhetoric, Packer and Stoneman show how popular texts are able to communicate their pessimism in ways that are paradoxically freed from the restrictive tools of optimism. A Feeling of Wrongness thus presents uncharted rhetorical possibilities for narrative, making visible the rhetorical efficacy of alternate ways and means of persuasion.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Cultural

232 pages, Hardcover

Published November 1, 2018

Reviews

[Sarah Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this a lot. The authors explained their points in an accessible manner. Fun and culturally-relevant examples. I thought the conclusion was particularly morally self-aware.

[Benoit Lelièvre · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this because of the Wisecrack video on True Detective and like most Academic books, it does a great job at explaining the what without explaining the why.

But aside from True Detective, pessimist philosophy is not exactly pervasive in pop culture. There are idiosyncratic exemples here and there, but it's not really a prevalent way of thinking. Thanks God it isn't but isn't it a little bit of an overkill to dedicate an entire book to it? The chapters on weird fiction and TD were more convincing than the rest, but it's otherwise a little light on its premise.