Postmodern Texts and Emotional Audiences ― Identity and the Politics of Feeling

Chabot Davis analyzes contemporary texts that bond together two seemingly antithetical sensibilities: the sentimental and the postmodern. Ranging across multiple media and offering a methodological union of textual analysis and reception study, Chabot Davis presents case studies of audience responses. Chabot Davis argues that sentimental postmodernism deepened leftist political engagement by moving audiences to identify emotionally with people across the divisions of gender, sexual identity, race, and ethnicity. This study questions the critical equation of postmodernism with apocalyptic nihilism and political apathy. The book also challenges the assumption that sentimentality and sympathy are inherently conservative and imperialistic.

Kimberly Chabot Davis teaches twentieth-century U.S. literature and film at Bridgewater State College. Kimberly Chabot Davis's articles on contemporary culture have been published in Twentieth Century Literature, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, South Atlantic Review, Politics and Culture, and Modern Fiction Studies.