Cruel Optimism

Author: Lauren Berlant
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN: 9780822351115
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life—with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy—despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives “add up to something.” Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory—with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary—is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present.

The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice

Author: Nasar Meer
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1447363027
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
What can we learn from successes and failures in the pursuit of racial justice in the UK and elsewhere in the Global North? A dominant view of racial justice has long been linked to a ‘cruel optimism’ which normalises social and political outcomes that sustain racial injustice, despite successive governments wielding the means to address it. Researchers, activists and minoritised groups continually identify the drivers of these outcomes, but have grown accustomed to persevering despite strong resistance to change. Looking at numerous examples across anti-racist movements and key developments in nationhood/nationalism, institutional racism, migration, white supremacy and the disparities of COVID-19, Nasar Meer argues for the need to move on from perpetual crisis in racial justice to a turning point that might herald a change to deep-seated systems of racism.

The Affect Theory Reader

Author: Melissa Gregg
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822347768
Category : FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
A collection of essays on affect theory, by groundbreaking scholars in the field.

The Hundreds

Author: Lauren Berlant
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478003332
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description
In The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart speculate on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of world-making. The experiment of the one hundred word constraint—each piece is one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long—amplifies the resonance of things that are happening in atmospheres, rhythms of encounter, and scenes that shift the social and conceptual ground. What's an encounter with anything once it's seen as an incitement to composition? What's a concept or a theory if they're no longer seen as a truth effect, but a training in absorption, attention, and framing? The Hundreds includes four indexes in which Andrew Causey, Susan Lepselter, Fred Moten, and Stephen Muecke each respond with their own compositional, conceptual, and formal staging of the worlds of the book.

Sex, or the Unbearable

Author: Lauren Berlant
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822355949
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
Sex, or the Unbearable is a dialogue between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, two of our leading theorists of sexuality, politics, and culture. In juxtaposing sex and the unbearable they don't propose that sex is unbearable, only that it unleashes unbearable contradictions that we nonetheless struggle to bear. In Berlant and Edelman's exchange, those terms invoke disturbances produced in encounters with others, ourselves, and the world, disturbances that tap into threats induced by fears of loss or rupture as well as by our hopes for repair. Through virtuoso interpretations of works of cinema, photography, critical theory, and literature, including Lydia Davis's story "Break It Down" (reprinted in full here), Berlant and Edelman explore what it means to live with negativity, with those divisions that may be irreparable. Together, they consider how such negativity affects politics, theory, and intimately felt encounters. But where their critical approaches differ, neither hesitates to voice disagreement. Their very discussion—punctuated with moments of frustration, misconstruction, anxiety, aggression, recognition, exhilaration, and inspiration—enacts both the difficulty and the potential of encounter, the subject of this unusual exchange between two eminent critics and close friends.

The Queen of America Goes to Washington City

Author: Lauren Gail Berlant
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822319245
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
Drawing on literature, the law, and popular media--and "taking her (counter)cue from that celebrated sitcom of American life, 'The Reagan Years'" (Homi K. Bhabha)--Berlant presents a stunning and major statement about the nation and its citizens in an age of mass mediation. Her intriguing narratives and gallery of images will challenge readers to rethink what it means to be an American and seek salvation in its promise. 57 photos.

The Female Complaint

Author: Lauren Berlant
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822389169
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
The Female Complaint is part of Lauren Berlant’s groundbreaking “national sentimentality” project charting the emergence of the U.S. political sphere as an affective space of attachment and identification. In this book, Berlant chronicles the origins and conventions of the first mass-cultural “intimate public” in the United States, a “women’s culture” distinguished by a view that women inevitably have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate and revelatory. As Berlant explains, “women’s” books, films, and television shows enact a fantasy that a woman’s life is not just her own, but an experience understood by other women, no matter how dissimilar they are. The commodified genres of intimacy, such as “chick lit,” circulate among strangers, enabling insider self-help talk to flourish in an intimate public. Sentimentality and complaint are central to this commercial convention of critique; their relation to the political realm is ambivalent, as politics seems both to threaten sentimental values and to provide certain opportunities for their extension. Pairing literary criticism and historical analysis, Berlant explores the territory of this intimate public sphere through close readings of U.S. women’s literary works and their stage and film adaptations. Her interpretation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its literary descendants reaches from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, touching on Shirley Temple, James Baldwin, and The Bridges of Madison County along the way. Berlant illuminates different permutations of the women’s intimate public through her readings of Edna Ferber’s Show Boat; Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life; Olive Higgins Prouty’s feminist melodrama Now, Voyager; Dorothy Parker’s poetry, prose, and Academy Award–winning screenplay for A Star Is Born; the Fay Weldon novel and Roseanne Barr film The Life and Loves of a She-Devil; and the queer, avant-garde film Showboat 1988–The Remake. The Female Complaint is a major contribution from a leading Americanist.

Cruel Auteurism

Author: Bonnie Lenore Kyburz
Publisher: CSU Open Press
ISBN: 9781607329183
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This book considers the rhetorical dimensions and pedagogical implications of film work in writing classrooms and as digital scholarship.

Problems of Hope

Author: Patrick Bresnihan
Publisher: ARN Press
ISBN: 0957588224
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 159

Book Description
However hopeless we often feel, we are creatures of hope. This collection of short accessible essays explores the ways in which hope is bound up with power in worlds that are composed through imagination, transformation and feeling. Hope is the most precious ingredient of power. The essays do not assume hope to be inherently good or emancipatory. Rather they reflect on how hope can both support and obstruct us in our efforts to make lives more livable, or futures more just. The essays draw on social research, philosophy, literature, music and film to show how hope might re-enchant writing and politics for a post-hopeful age. This is a book for those who want to remain hopeful but find it hard to see how. Contents Introduction: Problems of hope Cranes, Luke Carter On finding hope beyond progress, Leila Dawney Xanadu, Miles Link Hope without a future in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Patrick Bresnihan Eagles, Luke Carter Seeking, Claire Blencowe Hope in a minor key, Naomi Millner Hopefully indebted, Sam Kirwan Starlings, Luke Carter Rhythms of hope, Julian Brigstocke Networked hope, Aécio Amaral The Psychonaut’s journey: Race, closure, and hope, Tehseen Noorani Epilogue Further Reading

Infrastructures of Apocalypse

Author: Jessica Hurley
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452962677
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Book Description
A new approach to the vast nuclear infrastructure and the apocalypses it produces, focusing on Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American literatures Since 1945, America has spent more resources on nuclear technology than any other national project. Although it requires a massive infrastructure that touches society on myriad levels, nuclear technology has typically been discussed in a limited, top-down fashion that clusters around powerful men. In Infrastructures of Apocalypse, Jessica Hurley turns this conventional wisdom on its head, offering a new approach that focuses on neglected authors and Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American perspectives. Exchanging the usual white, male “nuclear canon” for authors that include James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ruth Ozeki, Infrastructures of Apocalypse delivers a fresh literary history of post-1945 America that focuses on apocalypse from below. Here Hurley critiques the racialized urban spaces of civil defense and reads nuclear waste as a colonial weapon. Uniting these diverse lines of inquiry is Hurley’s belief that apocalyptic thinking is not the opposite of engagement but rather a productive way of imagining radically new forms of engagement. Infrastructures of Apocalypse offers futurelessness as a place from which we can construct a livable world. It fills a blind spot in scholarship on American literature of the nuclear age, while also offering provocative, surprising new readings of such well-known works as Atlas Shrugged, Infinite Jest, and Angels in America. Infrastructures of Apocalypse is a revelation for readers interested in nuclear issues, decolonial literature, speculative fiction, and American studies.