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Berlant is the author of a national sentimentality trilogy beginning with ''The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life'' (1991). Based on their dissertation,<ref name=":2" /> the book looks at the formation of national identity as the relations between modes of belonging mediated by the state and law; by aesthetics, especially genre; and by the everyday life of social relations, drawing on [[Nathaniel Hawthorne]]'s work to illustrate these operations.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Romero|first=Lora|date=1993|title=Making History|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/1345688|journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction|volume=26|issue=2|pages=215–222|doi=10.2307/1345688|issn=0029-5132}}</ref>
Berlant is the author of a national sentimentality trilogy beginning with ''The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life'' (1991). Based on their dissertation,<ref name=":2" /> the book looks at the formation of national identity as the relations between modes of belonging mediated by the state and law; by aesthetics, especially genre; and by the everyday life of social relations, drawing on [[Nathaniel Hawthorne]]'s work to illustrate these operations.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Romero|first=Lora|date=1993|title=Making History|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/1345688|journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction|volume=26|issue=2|pages=215–222|doi=10.2307/1345688|issn=0029-5132}}</ref>


''The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship''—the title essay winning the 1993 Norman Foerster Award for best essay of the year in American literature<ref>{{Cite web|title=American Literature Section: The Foerster Prize|url=http://als-mla.org/FoersterList.htm|url-status=live|access-date=2021-06-29|website=Modern Language Association}}</ref>—introduced the idea of the "intimate public sphere" and looks at the production of politics and publicness since the Reagan era by way of the circulation of the personal, the sexual, and the intimate.<ref name=":3">{{Cite journal|last=Muñoz|first=José|date=2000|editor-last=|editor-first=|title=Citizens and Superheroes|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/30041852|journal=American Quarterly|volume=52|issue=2|pages=397–404|issn=0003-0678}}</ref> In his review, [[José Esteban Muñoz|José Muñoz]] described it as both [[Intersectionality|intersectional]], following [[Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw|Kimberlé Crenshaw]], and "post-[[Jürgen Habermas|Habermassian]]", in the vein of work by [[Nancy Fraser]] and Berlant's frequent collaborator [[Michael Warner]].<ref name=":3" /> Berlant's third entry in the trilogy, ''The Female Complaint: On the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture'' was published by Duke University Press in 2008. In it Berlant probed the origin of intimate publics in the mass cultural phenomenon of "women's culture," which crosses over the everyday institutions of intimacy, mass society, and, more distantly and ambivalently, politics; they took up this project by examining especially remade movies, such as [[Show Boat (1951 film)|''Show Boat'']], [[Imitation of Life (1959 film)|''Imitation of Life'']], and ''[[Uncle Tom's Cabin (1965 film)|Uncle Tom's Cabin]]''.{{cn|date=June 2021}}
''The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship''—the title essay winning the 1993 Norman Foerster Award for best essay of the year in American literature<ref>{{Cite web|title=American Literature Section: The Foerster Prize|url=http://als-mla.org/FoersterList.htm|url-status=live|access-date=2021-06-29|website=Modern Language Association}}</ref>—introduced the idea of the "intimate public sphere" and looks at the production of politics and publicness since the Reagan era by way of the circulation of the personal, the sexual, and the intimate.<ref name=":3">{{Cite journal|last=Muñoz|first=José|date=2000|editor-last=|editor-first=|title=Citizens and Superheroes|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/30041852|journal=American Quarterly|volume=52|issue=2|pages=397–404|issn=0003-0678}}</ref> In his review, [[José Esteban Muñoz|José Muñoz]] described it as both [[Intersectionality|intersectional]], following [[Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw|Kimberlé Crenshaw]], and "post-[[Jürgen Habermas|Habermassian]]", in the vein of work by [[Nancy Fraser]] and Berlant's frequent collaborator [[Michael Warner]].<ref name=":3" /> Berlant's third entry in the trilogy, ''The Female Complaint: On the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture'' was published by Duke University Press in 2008. In it Berlant probed the mass cultural phenomenon of "women's culture" as an originating site of “intimate publics", threading the everyday institutions of intimacy, mass society, and, more distantly and ambivalently, politics through fantasies rather than ideology.<ref name=":4">{{Cite journal|last=Hesford|first=Victoria|date=2012|title=Review of The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/41475084|journal=Journal of the History of Sexuality|volume=21|issue=2|pages=325–328|issn=1043-4070}}</ref> Berlant took up this project by examining especially melodramas and their remade movies in the first part of the twentieth century, such as [[Show Boat (1951 film)|''Show Boat'']], [[Imitation of Life (1959 film)|''Imitation of Life'']], and ''[[Uncle Tom's Cabin (1965 film)|Uncle Tom's Cabin]]''.<ref name=":4" />




Berlant's 2011 book, ''Cruel Optimism'', was published by [[Duke University Press]]. This book works its way across the U.S. and Europe to assess the level of contemporary crisis as [[neoliberalism]] wears away the fantasies of upward mobility associated with the liberal state.<ref>{{cite web|last=Berlant|first=Lauren|title=University of Chicago Department of English Language and Literature - Faculty|url=http://english.uchicago.edu/faculty/berlant|access-date=1 February 2014}}</ref> Cruel optimism manifests as a relational dynamic in which individuals create attachment as "clusters of promises" toward desired object-ideas even when they inhibit the conditions for flourishing and fulfilling such promises. Maintaining attachments that sustain the good life fantasy, no matter how injurious or cruel these attachments may be, allows people to make it through day-to-day life when the day-to-day has become unlivable.<ref name="acReview">{{Cite web|url=http://academicspeak.blogspot.com/2012/07/theory-review-lauren-berlants-cruel.html|title=Academics Speak: Theory Review: Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011)|first=A. Nerdy New|last=Yorker|date=July 10, 2012}}</ref> Elaborating on the specific dynamics of cruel optimism, Berlant emphasizes and maintains that it is not the object itself, but rather the relationship: <blockquote>"A relation of cruel optimism is a double-bind in which your attachment to an object sustains you in life at the same time as that object is actually a threat to your flourishing. So you can't say that there are objects that have the quality of cruelty or not cruelty, it's how you have the relationship to them. Like it might be that being in a couple is not a relation of cruel optimism for you, because being in a couple actually makes you feel like you have a grounding in the world, whereas for other people, being in a couple might be, on the one hand, a relief from loneliness, and on the other hand, the overpresence of one person who has to bear the burden of satisfying all your needs. So it's not the object that's the problem, but how we learn to be in relation."<ref>{{cite web|last=Berlant|first=Lauren|title=Interview With Lauren Berlant|url=http://societyandspace.com/material/interviews/interview-with-lauren-berlant/|publisher=Environment and Planning D: Society and Space|access-date=1 February 2014|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140202210157/http://societyandspace.com/material/interviews/interview-with-lauren-berlant/|archive-date=2 February 2014}}</ref></blockquote>An emphasis on the "present," which Berlant describes as structured through "crisis ordinariness," turns to affect and aesthetics as a way of apprehending these crises. Berlant suggests that it becomes possible to recognize that certain "genres" are no longer sustainable in the present and that new emergent aesthetic forms are taking hold that allow us to recognize modes of living not rooted in normative good life fantasies.<ref name="acReview" /> Discussing crisis ordinariness, Berlant describes it as their way "of talking about traumas of the social that are lived through collectively and that transform the sensorium to a heightened perceptiveness about the unfolding of the historical, and sometimes historic, moment (and sometimes publics organized around those senses, when experienced collectively)."<ref>{{cite web|last=Berlant|first=Lauren|title=Thinking about feeling historical|url=http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/politicalfeeling/files/2009/01/berlant-thinking-about-feeling.pdf|work=Article|publisher=Elsevier|access-date=1 February 2014}}</ref>
Berlant's 2011 book, ''Cruel Optimism'', was published by [[Duke University Press]]. This book works its way across the U.S. and Europe to assess the level of contemporary crisis as [[neoliberalism]] wears away the fantasies of upward mobility associated with the liberal state.<ref>{{cite web|last=Berlant|first=Lauren|title=University of Chicago Department of English Language and Literature - Faculty|url=http://english.uchicago.edu/faculty/berlant|access-date=1 February 2014}}</ref> Cruel optimism manifests as a relational dynamic in which individuals create attachment as "clusters of promises" toward desired object-ideas even when they inhibit the conditions for flourishing and fulfilling such promises. Maintaining attachments that sustain the good life fantasy, no matter how injurious or cruel these attachments may be, allows people to make it through day-to-day life when the day-to-day has become unlivable.<ref name="acReview">{{Cite web|url=http://academicspeak.blogspot.com/2012/07/theory-review-lauren-berlants-cruel.html|title=Academics Speak: Theory Review: Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011)|first=A. Nerdy New|last=Yorker|date=July 10, 2012}}</ref> Elaborating on the specific dynamics of cruel optimism, Berlant emphasizes and maintains that it is not the object itself, but rather the relationship: <blockquote>"A relation of cruel optimism is a double-bind in which your attachment to an object sustains you in life at the same time as that object is actually a threat to your flourishing. So you can't say that there are objects that have the quality of cruelty or not cruelty, it's how you have the relationship to them. Like it might be that being in a couple is not a relation of cruel optimism for you, because being in a couple actually makes you feel like you have a grounding in the world, whereas for other people, being in a couple might be, on the one hand, a relief from loneliness, and on the other hand, the overpresence of one person who has to bear the burden of satisfying all your needs. So it's not the object that's the problem, but how we learn to be in relation."<ref>{{cite web|last=Berlant|first=Lauren|title=Interview With Lauren Berlant|url=http://societyandspace.com/material/interviews/interview-with-lauren-berlant/|publisher=Environment and Planning D: Society and Space|access-date=1 February 2014|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140202210157/http://societyandspace.com/material/interviews/interview-with-lauren-berlant/|archive-date=2 February 2014}}</ref></blockquote>An emphasis on the "present," which Berlant describes as structured through "crisis ordinariness," turns to affect and aesthetics as a way of apprehending these crises. Berlant suggests that it becomes possible to recognize that certain "genres" are no longer sustainable in the present and that new emergent aesthetic forms are taking hold that allow us to recognize modes of living not rooted in normative good life fantasies.<ref name="acReview" /> Discussing crisis ordinariness, Berlant describes it as their way "of talking about traumas of the social that are lived through collectively and that transform the sensorium to a heightened perceptiveness about the unfolding of the historical, and sometimes historic, moment (and sometimes publics organized around those senses, when experienced collectively)."<ref>{{cite web|last=Berlant|first=Lauren|title=Thinking about feeling historical|url=http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/politicalfeeling/files/2009/01/berlant-thinking-about-feeling.pdf|work=Article|publisher=Elsevier|access-date=1 February 2014}}</ref>

Revision as of 18:03, 30 June 2021

Lauren Berlant
BornOctober 31, 1957
DiedJune 28, 2021(2021-06-28) (aged 63)
Education
Era20th and 21st century
EmployerUniversity of Chicago
Known for
TitleGeorge M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English
MovementWestern philosophy

Lauren Gail Berlant[1] (October 31, 1957 – June 28, 2021)[2] was an American scholar, cultural theorist, and author. Berlant was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, where they taught from 1984 until 2021.[3] Berlant wrote and taught issues of intimacy and belonging in popular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy of citizenship.[4]

Berlant wrote on public spheres as affect worlds, where affect and emotion lead the way for belonging ahead of the modes of rational or deliberative thought. These attach strangers to each other and shape the terms of the state-civil society relation.

Early life and education

Berlant was born in 1957 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[5][6] They graduated with a BA in English from Oberlin College in 1979,[7] then an MA from Cornell University in 1983,[6] and finally a PhD from Cornell in 1985,[8] after they had already begun teaching at the University of Chicago.[6] Berlant's dissertation was titled, Executing The Love Plot: Hawthorne and The Romance of Power (1985).[8]

Career

Berlant taught at University of Chicago from 1984 to 2021, becoming the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English.[3]

Berlant's awards included a Guggenheim Fellowship and the René Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association.[6] They were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.[6]

Works

Berlant is the author of a national sentimentality trilogy beginning with The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991). Based on their dissertation,[6] the book looks at the formation of national identity as the relations between modes of belonging mediated by the state and law; by aesthetics, especially genre; and by the everyday life of social relations, drawing on Nathaniel Hawthorne's work to illustrate these operations.[9]

The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship—the title essay winning the 1993 Norman Foerster Award for best essay of the year in American literature[10]—introduced the idea of the "intimate public sphere" and looks at the production of politics and publicness since the Reagan era by way of the circulation of the personal, the sexual, and the intimate.[11] In his review, José Muñoz described it as both intersectional, following Kimberlé Crenshaw, and "post-Habermassian", in the vein of work by Nancy Fraser and Berlant's frequent collaborator Michael Warner.[11] Berlant's third entry in the trilogy, The Female Complaint: On the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture was published by Duke University Press in 2008. In it Berlant probed the mass cultural phenomenon of "women's culture" as an originating site of “intimate publics", threading the everyday institutions of intimacy, mass society, and, more distantly and ambivalently, politics through fantasies rather than ideology.[12] Berlant took up this project by examining especially melodramas and their remade movies in the first part of the twentieth century, such as Show Boat, Imitation of Life, and Uncle Tom's Cabin.[12]


Berlant's 2011 book, Cruel Optimism, was published by Duke University Press. This book works its way across the U.S. and Europe to assess the level of contemporary crisis as neoliberalism wears away the fantasies of upward mobility associated with the liberal state.[13] Cruel optimism manifests as a relational dynamic in which individuals create attachment as "clusters of promises" toward desired object-ideas even when they inhibit the conditions for flourishing and fulfilling such promises. Maintaining attachments that sustain the good life fantasy, no matter how injurious or cruel these attachments may be, allows people to make it through day-to-day life when the day-to-day has become unlivable.[14] Elaborating on the specific dynamics of cruel optimism, Berlant emphasizes and maintains that it is not the object itself, but rather the relationship:

"A relation of cruel optimism is a double-bind in which your attachment to an object sustains you in life at the same time as that object is actually a threat to your flourishing. So you can't say that there are objects that have the quality of cruelty or not cruelty, it's how you have the relationship to them. Like it might be that being in a couple is not a relation of cruel optimism for you, because being in a couple actually makes you feel like you have a grounding in the world, whereas for other people, being in a couple might be, on the one hand, a relief from loneliness, and on the other hand, the overpresence of one person who has to bear the burden of satisfying all your needs. So it's not the object that's the problem, but how we learn to be in relation."[15]

An emphasis on the "present," which Berlant describes as structured through "crisis ordinariness," turns to affect and aesthetics as a way of apprehending these crises. Berlant suggests that it becomes possible to recognize that certain "genres" are no longer sustainable in the present and that new emergent aesthetic forms are taking hold that allow us to recognize modes of living not rooted in normative good life fantasies.[14] Discussing crisis ordinariness, Berlant describes it as their way "of talking about traumas of the social that are lived through collectively and that transform the sensorium to a heightened perceptiveness about the unfolding of the historical, and sometimes historic, moment (and sometimes publics organized around those senses, when experienced collectively)."[16]

In 2019, Berlant published The Hundreds with Kathleen Stewart, a collection of brief writing (a hundred words or a multiple of a hundred words) on ordinary encounters, applying affect theory to moments of unexamined daily life.[3] In The New Yorker, Hua Hsu said the book "calls to mind the adventurous, hybrid style of Fred Moten (the book includes a brief poem by him), Maggie Nelson, or Claudia Rankine, all of whom bend available literary forms into workable vessels for new ideas."[3]

Berlant was a founding member of Feel Tank Chicago in 2002[3] and has edited books on Compassion (2004) and Intimacy (2001), which won an award for the best special issue among all journals in the same year from the Academy of American Publishers,[citation needed] and which are interlinked with their work in feminist and queer theory in essays like "Sex in Public" (Critical Inquiry, 1999), Our Monica, Ourselves: Clinton and the Affairs of State (edited with Lisa Duggan, 2001) and Venus Inferred (with photographer Laura Letinsky, 2001). Berlant worked with many journals, including (as editor) Critical Inquiry[6] and Public Culture, and has chaired the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago.[citation needed]

Death

Berlant died of cancer (lymphoma) on June 28, 2021.[6] They were 63.

Berlant's papers are held at the Feminist Theory Archive of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. Berlant began donating them in 2014.[17]

Bibliography

Books

  • Berlant, Lauren (1991). The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-04377-7.
  • — (1997). The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-1931-3.
  • —; Letinsky, Laura (2000). Venus Inferred. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-47345-1.
  • — (2008). The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-8916-3.
  • — (2011). Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-5111-5. 2011 René Wellek Prize, American Comparative Literature Association
  • — (2012). Desire/Love. Punctum Books. ISBN 978-0-615-68687-5.
  • —; Edelman, Lee (2013). Sex, or the Unbearable. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-7706-1.
  • —; Stewart, Kathleen (2019-02-22). The Hundreds. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-1-4780-0183-6.

Edited collections

  • Berlant, Lauren, ed. (1998). Intimacy. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226384436.
  • —; Duggan, Lisa, eds. (2001). Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest. NYU Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-9864-5.
  • —, ed. (2004). Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-4159-7052-5.
  • —, ed. (2019). Reading Sedgwick. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-1-4780-0533-9.

References

  1. ^ Berlant, Lauren Gail (1997). The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-1931-3.
  2. ^ Kipling, Ella (2021-06-28). "Twitter mourns Lauren Berlant's death: The "Cruel Optimism" author's legacy explained". HITC. Retrieved 2021-06-28.
  3. ^ a b c d e Hsu, Hua (March 25, 2019). "Affect Theory and the New Age of Anxiety". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2021-06-28.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  4. ^ "Big Brains podcast: Why Chasing The Good Life Is Holding Us Back, With Lauren Berlant". news.uchicago.edu. Retrieved 2021-06-28.
  5. ^ Loizidou, Elena (December 19, 2013). "Lauren Berlant as Cynical Philosopher: An Introduction". Critical Legal Thinking. Retrieved 2021-06-28.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h "Lauren Berlant (1957–2021)". ArtForum. June 28, 2021. Retrieved 2021-06-29.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  7. ^ Carnig, Jennifer (June 9, 2005). "Lauren Berlant, Professor in English Language & Literature and the Committee on African and African-American Studies". the University of Chicago Chronicle. Retrieved 2021-06-28.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  8. ^ a b Pollock, Beth Ruby (1988). The Representation of Utopia: Hawthorne and the Female Medium. University of California, Berkeley.
  9. ^ Romero, Lora (1993). "Making History". NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. 26 (2): 215–222. doi:10.2307/1345688. ISSN 0029-5132.
  10. ^ "American Literature Section: The Foerster Prize". Modern Language Association. Retrieved 2021-06-29.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  11. ^ a b Muñoz, José (2000). "Citizens and Superheroes". American Quarterly. 52 (2): 397–404. ISSN 0003-0678.
  12. ^ a b Hesford, Victoria (2012). "Review of The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture". Journal of the History of Sexuality. 21 (2): 325–328. ISSN 1043-4070.
  13. ^ Berlant, Lauren. "University of Chicago Department of English Language and Literature - Faculty". Retrieved 1 February 2014.
  14. ^ a b Yorker, A. Nerdy New (July 10, 2012). "Academics Speak: Theory Review: Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011)".
  15. ^ Berlant, Lauren. "Interview With Lauren Berlant". Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Archived from the original on 2 February 2014. Retrieved 1 February 2014.
  16. ^ Berlant, Lauren. "Thinking about feeling historical" (PDF). Article. Elsevier. Retrieved 1 February 2014.
  17. ^ "Collection: Lauren Berlant papers | Brown University Library Special Collections". brown.as.atlas-sys.com. Retrieved 2021-06-29.