Emotional Culture and TV Narratives

Abstract

The fact that emotions unveil our values as well as our position in the larger social structure makes them an important source of self-knowledge and also knowledge about the world. By producing emotional reactions, fiction may become a privileged site of self-knowledge, both for the artist and for the public, although in different ways. While fiction cannot be taken as a faithful representation of factual reality, it does register emotional reactions to the facts as they are actually conveyed. From this perspective, the kind of fiction created in a given society constitutes relevant material for the sociology of culture.