Analysis Of Barbara Kingsolver's Careful What You Let In The Door

Superior Essays
Complexity of Emotion: Why Violence in the Media Must Remain Unregulated

Media enables humans to express emotions and experiences unique to the species. No other creature thinks, understands, or feels at nearly the same level, and as such, they show what feelings they do have impulsively and without dignity. Writing and filmmaking allows humans to rise above all this, supporting a nonaggressive approach to conveying intense emotion. A writer recreates these emotions in a work by inventing an act of violence. Humans psychologically must be able to freely express whatever emotions they have, even violent ones, but some believe that fictitious violence in the media is insincere and should be more explicitly related to its potential consequences. In spite of this viewpoint, writing remains a positive outlet for these emotions and cannot be regulated if writers are to have true freedom.
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She insists that the apparent lack of consequence and failure to recognize wrongdoing hurts the general public, especially young people. Citing psychological studies and articles, she asserts that humans are inclined to act more hostile the more they are exposed to violence, whether real or staged, particularly if that violent situation seems indifferent to its consequences. With this in mind, Kingsolver wonders why writers feel the need to write fictitiously of unpunished violence, and she calls for the end of this practice by enforcement of certain criteria for violence in media. However, Kingsolver doesn’t realize that humans need to write about violence in order to release strong emotions that society

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