Abstract
In this chapter, Maya Higashi Wakana summarizes the revelations uncovered by the book’s acts of defamiliarization, which demonstrate the value of reading microsocially. Juxtaposing instances in the examined texts when individuals fail to identify the “face” of an animate other, literal and/or figurative, against a situation in which one interacts with an inanimate object—FedEx employee Chuck Noland’s relationship with a volleyball in the film Cast Away, for example—Wakana articulates the automatic gestures individuals engage in when they are in others’ company. Although the goal of the book is to demonstrate the value of reading microsocially, a valuable byproduct is an elaboration on the relationship between art and life. They are, the author asserts and illustrates in the book, inseparable.
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Notes
- 1.
Oscar Wilde’s ([1891] 1913) assertion that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life” is true: “Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it depends on the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing” (38, 39). Henry James (1958) seems to echo Wilde’s claim in a 1915 letter to H. G. Wells: “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, … and I know of no substitute whatever for the form and beauty of its process” (267).
- 2.
Sociologist Jochen Kleres (2011) proposes for his field a methodological approach to the study of “emotions’ narrative nature” and the “[e]motional [n]ature of [n]arratives” (183, 186), offering a summary of recent developments in the study of emotions and narratives.
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Wakana, M.H. (2018). Conclusion: Art Makes Life, Which Makes Art, Which Makes Life. In: Performing Intimacies with Hawthorne, Austen, Wharton, and George Eliot. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93991-9_7
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