Cover: Pursuing Happiness, 2nd Edition by Matthew Parfitt; Dawn Skorczewski

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Pursuing Happiness

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Second  Edition©2020  Matthew Parfitt; Dawn Skorczewski

ISBN:9781319258795

ISBN:9781319056322

ISBN:9781319388430

About

A fun topic for series inquiry -- at an affordable price.

The Bedford Spotlight Reader Series brings critical topics to life in a portable, cost-effective reader. In this volume, you’ll explore these questions: What is the psychology of happiness? Can we make or buy our own happiness? How should we question what makes us happy? How can we make ourselves and others happy? Does technology make us happy?

Readings by philosophers, psychologists, spiritual leaders, ethicists, economists, and others take up these issues and more. This book helps you form your own questions as you investigate this popular and intellectually rich topic.

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Table of Contents

[[new selections are marked with an asterisk]]

About The Bedford Spotlight Reader Series

Preface for Instructors

Contents by Discipline

Contents by Theme

Contents by Rhetorical Purpose

Introduction for Students

Chapter 1. What is Happiness?

*Voltaire, The Good Brahmin

His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler, The Sources of Happiness

Martha C. Nussbaum, Who Is the Happy Warrior? Philosophy Poses Questions to Psychology

*Darrin M. McMahon, From the Happiness of Virtue to the Virtue of Happiness: 400 BC–AD 1780

*Sissela Bok, Illusion

*Sara Ahmed, Happiness and Queer Politics

*Jon Meacham, Free to Be Happy

Chapter 2. What Makes People Happy?

Michael Argyle and Peter Hills, The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, If We Are So Rich, Why Aren’t We Happy?

National Academy of Sciences, Global Well-Being Ladder

Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, Can Money Buy Happiness?

*Hal E. Hershfield, Cassie Mogilner, and Uri Barnea, People Who Choose Time Over Money Are Happier

Sonja Lyubomirsky, How Happy Are You and Why?

Ed Diener and Martin Seligman, Very Happy People

 

Chapter 3. Do We Deserve to Be Happy

Jennifer Michael Hecht, Remember Death

*Emily Esfahani Smith, There’s More to Life than Being Happy

Giles Fraser, Taking Pills for Unhappiness Reinforces the Idea That Being Sad Is Not Human

John Keats, Ode on Melancholy

*Laren Stover, The Case for Melancholy

*Naomi Shihab Nye, Kindness

*The New Economics Foundation, The Happy Planet Index

Mohsen Joshanloo and Dan Weijers, Aversion to Happiness across Cultures: A Review of Where and Why People Are Averse to Happiness

David Brooks, What Suffering Does

 

Chapter 4. Can We Create Our Own Happiness?

Gretchen Rubin, July: Buy Some Happiness

*Lucky Strike Cigarettes, Be Happy, Go Lucky

*Oliver Sacks, My Own Life

Graham Hill, Living with Less. A Lot Less.

*Lucille Clifton, won’t you celebrate with me

Noelle Oxenhandler, Ah, But the Breezes . . .

*Paul E. Jose, Bee T. Lim, and Fred B. Bryant, Does Savoring Increase Happiness? A Daily Diary Study

 

Chapter 5. Does Technology Make Us Happier?

*Maria Konnikova, How Facebook Makes Us Unhappy

*Lynn Stuart Parramore, Happy All the Time

*Adam Piore, What Technology Can’t Change About Happiness

*James McWilliams, Saving the Self in the Age of the Selfie.

*Sherry Turkle, Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.

*Max Strom, from There Is No App for Happiness

 

*Sentence Guides for Academic Writers

Acknowledgements

Index of Authors and Titles

Matthew Parfitt

Matthew Parfitt (Ph.D., Boston College) is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Chair of the Division of Rhetoric at Boston University’s College of General Studies.  In 2002 he received the Peyton Richter Award for interdisciplinary teaching. He is coeditor of Conflicts and Crises in the Composition Classroom—And What Instructors Can Do About Them and Cultural Conversations: The Presence of the Past.

Dawn Skorczewski

Dawn Skorczewski (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is Professor of English and Director of University Writing at Brandeis University. An Affiliate Scholar at Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, she is the author of Teaching One Moment at a Time: Disruption and Repair in the Classroom and An Accident of Hope: The Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton. She is co-editor of Conflicts and Crises in the Composition Classroom. She was the 2013 Fulbright Professor of American Culture in Amsterdam. For Bedford/St. Martins she has edited, with Matthew Parfitt, Pursuing Happiness: A Bedford Spotlight Reader (2015).