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Pursuing Happiness

A Bedford Spotlight ReaderSecond Edition ©2020 Matthew Parfitt; Dawn Skorczewski

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ISBN:9781319056322

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A brief and versatile reader at an affordable price.

Pursuing Happiness: A Bedford Spotlight Reader explores questions around the central concept of what makes us happy: 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. Questions and assignments for each selection provides a range of activities for students. The catalog page for the titles in the Spotlight Series offers comprehensive instructor support with sample syllabi and additional teaching resources.

Features

Bedford care and quality in every volume. Each volume in the Bedford Spotlight Reader Series is developed with attention to design, pedagogy, and compelling readings that work in the classroom.

Affordable, and an ideal package option. Each Bedford Spotlight Reader offers plenty of material for a composition course while keeping the price low. Combine one of the Bedford Spotlight Readers with a handbook or rhetoric and save 20 percent off the combined price. Package any Bedford Spotlight Reader with Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing: A Bedford Spotlight Rhetoric by Jeff Ousborne for free (a $10 value).

Multiple perspectives on happiness and its effects on individuals and society. To foster student engagement, five chapters built around central questions on the subject of happiness offer numerous entry points for inquiry and discussion. A mix of genres and accessible and challenging selections allow instructors to tailor their approach to each classroom. Some examples:

The Dalai Lama writes in "The Sources of Happiness" that "happiness is determined more by one’s state of mind than by external events."
Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener ask, "Can Money Buy Happiness?" You may be surprised by their answer: "With some important caveats, money can help buy happiness."
Oliver Sacks, in “My Own Life,” reflects on his life in the face of imminent death.

An excellent choice for courses that focus on academic writing. Pursuing Happiness includes documented essays and selections from a range of disciplines, allowing students to focus on substantive academic writing projects.

Thoughtful support for writers and instructors. A general introduction, chapter introductions, and headnotes provide context, and prompts and assignments offer suggestions for discussion, informal writing, and research; ways to connect selections; and assignments for writing. Additional contents organized by theme, discipline, and rhetorical purpose offer professors flexibility when designing their course. The catalog at macmillanlearning.com offers support for teaching the themes, sample syllabi, and a list of related resources and links.

New to This Edition

20 new reading selections that include more disciplines and flexibility for teaching about happiness in your course. For example,

Sherry Turkle, in “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk,” touches on the threats to happiness in the digital age.
Lauren Stover, in “The Case for Melancholy,” writes about the value of embracing a somber mood.
Emily Esfahani Smith, in “There’s More to Life than Being Happy,” draws distinctions between being happy and leading a meaningful life.

A new chapter on technology. Based on feedback from instructors, Pursuing Happiness now features a new chapter on technology. Chapter 5 asks students to consider the effect technology has on our social and emotional wellbeing, and the complicated question of whether or not our smartphones and social media accounts are actually making us happier. Essays include a look at surveillance in the workplace from Lynn Stuart Parramore, Sherry Turkle’s strategies to help stay human amid technology overload, Max Strom’s take on the impact of misuse of technology, and more.

An appendix, "Sentence Guides for Academic Writers." This section helps with an essential skill: working with and responding to others’ ideas. This practical module helps students develop an academic writing voice by giving them sentence guides, or templates, to follow in a variety of composing situations.

“This book provides significant research on the popular topic of happiness, giving students access to experts in the fields of sociology and psychology, in addition to readings on the philosophical underpinnings of happiness and the core issues surrounding a life well lived.”
—Barbara Kline, Seattle Pacific University

“In the Bedford Spotlight readers, particularly Pursuing Happiness, I finally found an anthology with enough variety and enough truly appealing texts to suit my students’ needs.”
—Jacqueline Williams, Fresno City College

“This is a compact textbook that shows the complexity of the seemingly simple concept of happiness by providing readings from many disciplines, faith backgrounds, and historical periods. It is a refreshing book because it offers readings that you dont typically find in readers for freshman comp, and the questions it prompts students to ask are also unique.”
—Zachary Beck, East Texas Baptist University

Pursuing Happiness

Matthew Parfitt; Dawn Skorczewski

Pursuing Happiness

Second Edition 2020

Matthew Parfitt; Dawn Skorczewski

[[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

Pursuing Happiness

Second Edition 2020

Matthew Parfitt; Dawn Skorczewski

Find Your Rep

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).

Pursuing Happiness

Second Edition 2020

Matthew Parfitt; Dawn Skorczewski

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