Storied Feelings: Emotions, Culture, Media

Mass mediated emotional experiences are central to late modern subjectivity. Narrative storytelling creates public sites where audiences encounter and negotiate shared sociocultural circumstances rendered in aesthetic terms. Popular narratives move us by providing access, through felt recognition, to aspects of our emotional existence that would otherwise remain inexpressible. Using examples from film, this chapter explores how emotions as public events, constituted as part of collectively experienced social, cultural, and historical conditions, are enacted or realized through narrative media.