A collection of timely essays on the rising wave of anxiety in culture. The twenty-first century is characterized by uncertainty: from catastrophic climate change to the accelerating pace of technological change, societies around the world are gripped by anxiety about the future. In Anxiety Culture, editors John Allegrante, Ulrich Hoinkes, Michael Schapira, and Karen Struve bring together a distinguished group of international scholars to examine the forces that increase anxiety as a phenomenon beyond solely individual experiences of clinical anxiety to pervade global culture. These trenchant essays examine our culture of anxiety across diverse avenues of society. Covering fears related to climate change, populist and extremist movements around the world, gun violence, artificial intelligence, and more, contributors also examine how anxiety is expressed in literature and the media and how a culture of anxiety affects policymaking. Chapters are organized into five sections: disciplinary perspectives on anxiety, climate change and the environment, population health and social well-being, migration, and technology. There's room for hope, however. Contributors provide pragmatic recommendations for coping with anxiety culture in public education, governments, and NGOs. Anxiety Culture is a unique attempt to define this condition and an indispensable resource for those seeking stability in an unstable age, providing a set of conceptual and practical narratives for navigating both existing and emergent planetary challenges. Contributors: Kristina Allgoewer, Bryndis Asgeirsdottir, John Baldacchino, Christine Blaettler, Michel Bourban, Dominic Boyer, Eva J. Daussà, Nicholas Freudenberg, Monica van der Haagen-Wulff, Kelsey Hudson, Karena Kalmbach, Emmanuel Kattan, Markus Lemmens, Eric Lewandowski, Raphaël Liogier, Roman Marek, Christian Martin, Paul Mecheril, Angelika Messner, Caine C. A. Meyers, Julie Mostov, Dirk Nabers, Frauke Nees, Konrad Ott, Sonali Rajan, Julie Reshe, Bàrbara Roviró, Renata Selecl, Inga Dora Sigfusdottir, Frank Stengel, Ingibjorg Eva Thorisdottir, Maren Urner, Iris Wieczorek, Zhao Xudong, Liya Yu

This book explores the nature of modern culture as a culture of anxiety, analyzing the modes in which such anxiety presents itself. Drawing on sociological and philosophical concepts of modernity, the author builds on the work of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud to offer an understanding of modern anxiety culture as the reverse side of risk culture, which stabilizes itself by concealing or making familiar the social phenomena of risk society. Through explorations of memory, politics, art, clairvoyance, notions of national community, and identity, this volume sheds light on the fissures in our culture where anxiety appears, thus revealing its underlying volatility. A study of the ruptures in our modern culture, Anxiety and Lucidity will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory, anthropology, and philosophy with interests in late modern culture.

Four brilliant essays by the author of 'Hermes and His Children' hailing the elemental force of the irrational in a world that is all too often 'explained' and 'understood': Moon Madness -- Titanic Love; Cultural Anxiety; Reflections on the Duende; Consciousness of Failure. López-Pedraza passionately urges us to acknowledge our roots in the soul and our debt to the unknowable.

Anxiety as not only a feeling of dread, but a feeling that we dread is widely considered by both philosophical and psychoanalytic thinkers as an important signal related to our experience of the cultural and intersubjective world. Stephen Felder explores the experience of anxiety through the writings of the existentialist, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic traditions, especially Jacques Lacan, to make sense out of this dreadful experience. Working from Lacan’s claim that the structure of anxiety and fantasy are the same, Felder shows that anxiety is a signal of the Lacanian Real and thus provides us with a point of view from which to critique the cultural world by clarifying how we experience ourselves and others. The chapters examine the implications of this insight for how we think about the visual field, sex, race, consumerism, and what Stuart Hall called the “contradictions of culture” in our attempts to live more vibrant lives and create more emancipatory practices in the twenty-first century.

Performance Anxiety in Media Culture explores the culture of performance anxiety in the media-saturated contemporary world. It uses comparative case studies including film, social media, and popular music to examine the ways that personal concern regarding self-presentation becomes transformed into shared cultural expressions through the use of media technologies. Three initial chapters are dedicated to exploring the work of Erving Goffman, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Baudrillard as critical for a thorough understanding of how implications of a range of recent transformations in the methods for staging social performances are staged and in the ways that they are experienced and interpreted by others. Three subsequent chapters explore diverse case studies in the culture of performance anxiety: the representation of such anxieties in recent French cinema, the appearance of them in the world of fashion-based 'outfit of the day' blogs, and the attempt to refine a more fixed social persona in the nostalgic culture of rockabilly music.

The accruement of crises over the last two decades, with their particular manifestations in the European context, has evoked the feeling of living in exceptional times, as captured in the recurrent claim that we live in the "age of anxiety." The main aim of this collection is to analyse, from a multidisciplinary perspective, the causes and consequences of the current dominance of the discourse of fear, anxiety, and crisis through the experience of distinct and often interdependent moral panics in twenty-first-century Europe. With its multidisciplinary approach, this volume sheds light on the need to view the interrelationship between different crises and their associated affects as crucial in attaining a more nuanced understanding of the aetiology and effects of the current "age of anxiety." This multidisciplinary scrutiny of the interrelationship of twenty-first-century fears, anxiety and crises signals an original engagement with these complex phenomena in order to make their emergence and profound effects on contemporary society more comprehensible. The timeliness of the thematic focus and the rigorous in-depth analyses make this collection relevant to students and academics within the fields of sociology, literary and cultural studies, political science and anthropology, as well as to those in European studies and global studies.

A collection of timely essays on the rising wave of anxiety in culture. The twenty-first century is characterized by uncertainty: from catastrophic climate change to the accelerating pace of technological change, societies around the world are gripped by anxiety about the future. In Anxiety Culture, editors John Allegrante, Ulrich Hoinkes, Michael Schapira, and Karen Struve bring together a distinguished group of international scholars to examine the forces that increase anxiety as a phenomenon beyond solely individual experiences of clinical anxiety to pervade global culture. These trenchant essays examine our culture of anxiety across diverse avenues of society. Covering fears related to climate change, populist and extremist movements around the world, gun violence, artificial intelligence, and more, contributors also examine how anxiety is expressed in literature and the media and how a culture of anxiety affects policymaking. Chapters are organized into five sections: disciplinary perspectives on anxiety, climate change and the environment, population health and social well-being, migration, and technology. There's room for hope, however. Contributors provide pragmatic recommendations for coping with anxiety culture in public education, governments, and NGOs. Anxiety Culture is a unique attempt to define this condition and an indispensable resource for those seeking stability in an unstable age, providing a set of conceptual and practical narratives for navigating both existing and emergent planetary challenges. Contributors: Kristina Allgoewer, Bryndis Asgeirsdottir, John Baldacchino, Christine Blaettler, Michel Bourban, Dominic Boyer, Eva J. Daussà, Nicholas Freudenberg, Monica van der Haagen-Wulff, Kelsey Hudson, Karena Kalmbach, Emmanuel Kattan, Markus Lemmens, Eric Lewandowski, Raphaël Liogier, Roman Marek, Christian Martin, Paul Mecheril, Angelika Messner, Caine C. A. Meyers, Julie Mostov, Dirk Nabers, Frauke Nees, Konrad Ott, Sonali Rajan, Julie Reshe, Bàrbara Roviró, Renata Selecl, Inga Dora Sigfusdottir, Frank Stengel, Ingibjorg Eva Thorisdottir, Maren Urner, Iris Wieczorek, Zhao Xudong, Liya Yu

This report provides evidence of the universality of anxiety as a Fundamental Emotion Across Cultures, And The Differentiation Between anxiety as a transitory state and a stable personality trait. It is of interest to those concerned with the psychological concept of strait- trait anxiety.