Deciphering Violence: The Cognitive Structure of Right and Wrong

In the current information age, Americans are bombarded daily with stories and images portraying a rising tide of violence. Drawing on media that includes television, newspaper, fiction, film, painting and photography, as well as interviews and focus groups, Karen Cerulo explores the ways in which individuals think about, depict and evaluate violence.

Moving beyond typical studies that focus on violent story content, Deciphering Violence decodes the role of story structure itself and how the sequencing of facts can systematically influence our moral judgements of violent acts. The book identifies institutionalized forms of violent storytelling and raises new possibilities both for decreasing public tolerance of violence and increasing social control of the phenomenon.

Booknews

Cerulo (sociology, Rutgers U.) analyzes everyday journalistic and media accounts, as well as works such as Goya's The Third of May, Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, Scorcese's The Godfather, and classic images of photojournalism. He identifies the institutionalized forms of violent storytelling and raises new possibilities for both decreasing public tolerance of violence and increasing social control of the phenomenon. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Karen A. Cerulo is Associate Profess of Sociology at Rutgers University. She is author of Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of a Nation (1996) and co-author of Second Thoughts: Seeing Conventional Wisdom Through the Sociological Eye (1997).