San Antonio College Library

In this fascinating and witty account, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom draws on insights from child development, philosophy, neuroscience, and behavioral economics to examine the science behind our curious desires, attractions, and tastes, covering everything from the animal instincts for sex and food to the uniquely human taste for art, music, and stories.

"Many people believe that pleasure and desire are obstacles to reasonable and intelligent behavior. In The Pleasure Center, Morten Kringelbach reveals that what we desire, what pleases us - in fact, our most base, animalistic tendencies - are actually very important sources of information. They motivate us For a good reason. And understanding that reason, taking that reason into account, and harnessing and directing that reason, can make us much more...

When someone suffers a mishap, a setback or a downfall, we sometimes find ourselves experiencing schadenfreude - an emotion defined as deriving pleasure from another's misfortune. Schadenfreude is a common experience and an emotion which is seemingly inherent to social being. This book offers a comprehensive summary of current theoretical and empirical work on schadenfreude from psychological, philosophical and other scientific perspectives. The chapters...

Presents an evaluation of the culture of vice and excessive misbehavior, offering insight into the appeal and rewards of taboo hobbies and advice on how to indulge in covert activities while retaining one's dignity if discovered.

The author examines how Henry James progressively disentangled himself from the moralising frame through which English-language novels in the nineteenth century had imagined sexual passion. The author argues that his relationship with the European novel tradition was crucial, helping him to leave behind a way of seeing in which only 'bad' women could be sexual. She reads James's transitional fictions of the 1890s as explorations of how disabling and...

"In Edible Arrangements, Elizabeth Blake explores the way modernist writing about eating plumbs larger questions about bodily and literary pleasure. Drawing on insights from the field of food studies, she makes dual interventions into queer theory and modernist studies: first, locating an embrace of queerness within modernist depictions of the pleasure of eating, and second, showing how this queer consumption shapes modernist notions of literary form,...

"About a Chinese American chef who, lured to a decadent, enigmatic colony of the super rich in a near future in which food is disappearing, discovers the meaning of pleasure and the ethics of who gets to enjoy it, altering her life and, indirectly, the world"-- A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world's troubles....