Lauren Berlant

Template:Scholia Lauren Gail Berlant (October 31, 1957 – June 28, 2021) was an American scholar, cultural theorist, and author who is regarded as "one of the most esteemed and influential literary and cultural critics in the United States." Berlant was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, where she/theyTemplate:Efn taught from 1984 until 2021. Berlant wrote and taught issues of intimacy and belonging in popular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy of citizenship.

Berlant wrote on public spheres as they 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. Berlant's writings have been translated into at least eight languages.

Early life and education

Berlant was born on October 31, 1957, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She/they graduated with a BA in English from Oberlin College in 1979, then an MA from Cornell University in 1983, and finally a PhD from Cornell in 1985, after she/they had already begun teaching at the University of Chicago. (She/they said student loans obliged them to continue straight through school without a break that would have triggered loan repayment.) Berlant's dissertation was titled, Executing The Love Plot: Hawthorne and The Romance of Power (1985).

Career

Berlant taught at the University of Chicago from 1984 to 2021, becoming the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English. The university awarded them a Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1989), a Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring (2005), and the Norman Maclean Faculty Award (2019).

Berlant's other honors included a Guggenheim Fellowship and, for their book Cruel Optimism, the René Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association and the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award from the Modern Language Association (MLA) for the best book in queer studies in literature or cultural studies. Berlant was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.

Berlant was a founding member of Feel Tank Chicago in 2002, a play on think tank. She/they worked with many journals, including (as editor) Critical Inquiry. She/they also edited Duke University Press's Theory Q series along with Lee Edelman, Benjamin Kahan, and Christina Sharpe.

Works

Berlant was the author of a national sentimentality trilogy beginning with The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 1991). Based on their dissertation, 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.

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—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. 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. Berlant's third book (though second in the trilogy), The Female Complaint: On the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture was published by Duke University Press in 2008. The project initially began in the 1980s when Berlant noticed striking similarities in writing by Erma Bombeck and Fanny Fern, who skewered married life for women in nearly identical ways despite being separated by 150 years. Berlant pursued this 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. 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.

Berlant's 2011 book, Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press) 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. 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. 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.

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. Discussing crisis ordinariness, Berlant described 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)."

Berlant has edited books on Compassion (2004) and Intimacy (2001), which are interlinked with their seminal work in feminist and queer theory in essays like "What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?" (with Michael Warner, 1995), "Sex in Public" (with Michael Warner, 1998), Our Monica, Ourselves: Clinton and the Affairs of State (edited with Lisa Duggan, 2001), and Venus Inferred (with photographer Laura Letinsky, 2001).

Style

Berlant's writing is semantically dense and formally experimental. She/they co-wrote with multiple other academics (collaboratively with Michael Warner and Kathleen Stewart, in dialog with Lee Edelman) and as part of collectives (including Chicago Cultural Studies Group in the early 1990s, The Late Liberalism Collective in the mid-00s, and Feel Tank Chicago for two decades). A large part of Berlant's critical and creative work in the last two decades of her/their life took the form of interviews and dialogs.

In 2019, Berlant published The Hundreds with 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. 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."

Death

Berlant was diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 2017, after which she/they collaborated with artist Riva Lehrer for a portrait in the latter's "Risk Series." The painting is now in the Collection of The National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum. Berlant died at a Chicago hospice facility on June 28, 2021, at age 63. She/they are survived by their partner Ian Horswill. Some of Berlant's writing about cancer was published posthumosuly in The Affect Theory Reader 2.

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

Bibliography

Edited

• The Black Public Sphere (as editorial member of the Black Public Sphere Collective), University of Chicago Press, 1997. ISBN 978-0-2260-7192-3. https://archive.org/details/isbn_6369142017951
• “Violence and Redemption,” (as editorial member of the Late Liberalism Collective), Public Culture 15.1 (2003). ISSN 0899-2363. https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/2467
• “On the Case,” two-volume special issue of Critical Inquiry, 33.4, 34.1 (2007). https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/524831, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/526095
• “Comedy: An Issue,” with Sianne Ngai, Critical Inquiry, 43.2 (2017). https://www.jstor.org/stable/e26547680

Articles and essays

• • Reprinted in: Reading with a Difference: Gender, Race, and Cultural Identity, eds. Arthur F. Marotti, Renata R. Mautner, Jo Dulan, and Suchitra Mathur (Wayne State UP, 1994), 63–82.
• • Reprinted in: Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, eds. Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Anthony Appiah (Amistad, 1993).
  • Reprinted in: Alice Walker, Modern Critical Views, new edition, ed. Harold Bloom (Infobase, 2007).
  • Reprinted in: The Color Purple: New Critical Essays, ed. Mae G. Henderson (Oxford UP, 2020).
• • Reprinted in: The American Literary History Reader, ed. Gordon Hutner (Oxford UP, 1995).
• • Reprinted in: The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (Oxford UP, 1993), 265–281.
• • Reprinted in: The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 173–208
• • Reprinted in: Multiculturalism: A Reader, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Blackwell, 1994), 114–139.
• • Reprinted in: Fear of a Queer Planet, ed. Michael Warner (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 193–229;
  • Reprinted in: The Material Queer: A Lesbigay Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Donald Morton (Westview Press, 1996).
  • Reprinted in: Radical Street Performance, ed. Jan Cohen-Cruz (Routledge, 1999), 133–142.
• • Reprinted in: Nations and Nationalism, eds. Geoff Eley and Ronald Suny (Oxford UP, 1996).
  • Reprinted in: The Media Studies Reader, ed. Laurie Ouellette (Routledge, 2013).
• • Reprinted in: Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and Michael Moon (Duke UP, 1995).
  • Reprinted in: Feminisms, eds. Diana Price Herndl and Robin Warhol (Rutgers UP, 1997)..
• • Reprinted in: boundary2 anthology, ed. Paul Bové (Duke UP, 1998).
• • Reprinted in: After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s, eds. Christopher Newfield and Ronald Strickland (Westview Press, 1995), 313–339.
• • Reprinted in: The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, eds. Neil Badmington and Julia Thomas (Routledge, 2008), 415–421.
• • Reprinted in: Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Natsha Hurley and Stephen Bruhm (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 57–80.
• • Reprinted in: Popular Culture: A Reader, eds. Raiford A Guins, Omayra Zaragoza Cruz (Sage, 2005), 309–323.
  • Reprinted in: The Race and Media Reader, ed. Gilbert Rodman (Routledge, 2014).
• • Reprinted in: Mediations 21 (1998): 6–15
  • Reprinted in: Profession(1998):105–116, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25595642
• • Reprinted in: The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd. edition, ed. Simon During (Routledge, 1999).
  • Reprinted in: The Critical Tradition, ed. David Richter (Duke UP, 2002), (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2007): 1721- 1733.
  • Reprinted in: The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, ed. Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose (Routledge, 2012).
• • Reprinted in: No More Separate Spheres!, eds. Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher (Duke UP, 2002), 291–324.
• • Reprinted in: Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism, eds. Jackie Stacey, Celia Lury, and Sara Ahmed (Routledge, 2000).
  • Reprinted in: Feminism at the Millennium, ed. Misha Kavka (Columbia UP, 2000).
  • Reprinted in: Cultural Studies and Political Theory, ed. Jodi Dean (Cornell UP, 2001), 42–62.
  • Reprinted in: Left Legalism, Left Critique, eds. Janet Halley and Wendy Brown (Duke UP, 2002), 105–133.
  • Reprinted in: Traumatizing Theory: The Cultural Politics of Affect In and Beyond Psychoanalysis, ed. Karyn Ball (Other Press, 2007).
• • Reprinted in: Feminisms Redux: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, eds. Diane Warhol and Robyn Herndyl (Rutgers UP, 2009), 244–276.
• • Revised and reprinted in: Visual Worlds, eds. John R Hall, Blake Stimson, Lisa Tamiris Becker (Routledge, 2006).
• • Reprinted in: Sexualities in Education: A Reader, eds. Therese Quinn and Erica R. Meiners (Peter Lang, 2012).
• • Longer version:
  • Reprinted in: The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Greg Seigworth (Duke UP, 2010), pp. 93–117.
• • Reprinted in: After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory, eds. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker (Duke UP, 2011).
• • Reprinted in: Contemporary Literary Criticism, ed. Jeff Hunter (Oxford UP, 2014).
• • Reprinted in: Political Emotions, eds., Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann Reynolds (Routledge, 2010), 229–245.
• • Reprinted in: The Critical Pulse: Thirty-Six Credos by Contemporary Critics, eds., Jeffrey Williams and Heather Steffen (Columbia UP, 2012), 173–179.
• and
  • Reprinted in: Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo: A Verso Report (Verso Books, 2018) ISBN: 978-1-7887-3275-8.

Interviews and dialogues

• “The Promise of Berlant: An Interview,” by Imogen Tyler and Elena Loizidou Cultural Values 4 (2000):497-511.
• “Loose Lips: An Interview with Jane Gallop” in Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
• “Citizen Berlant: An Interview with Lauren Berlant,” Andy Hoberek, Minnesota Review, nos. 52-54, 2002.
  • Reprinted in Interviews from the Minnesota Review, ed. Jeffrey Williams (2004).
• “The Broken Circuit: An Interview with Lauren Berlant,” by Sina Najafi and David Serlin, Cabinet (2008).
  • Reprinted in The Affect Reader of the “If I Can’t Dance” collective, Stockholm.
• “I Don’t Understand the God Part: A Conversation between Dorothea Lasky and Lauren Berlant,” Make magazine, 8 (Summer 2009).
  • Reprinted in Make X (2016), ed. Jose-Luis Moctezuma, forthcoming.
• Lauren Berlant, Gesa Helms, Marina Vishmidt, “Affect & the Politics of Austerity: An Interview Exchange with Lauren Berlant,” Variant 39/40 (Winter 2010): 3-6.
• Jay Prosser, “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: An Interview with Lauren Berlant,” Biography 34, 1 (Winter 2011): 180-187.
• “Depressive Realism: An Interview with Lauren Berlant,” Hypocrite Reader 5 (2011) (www.hypocritereader.com)
• Lauren Berlant, “On her book Cruel Optimism,” 5 June 2012, Rorotoko at http://rorotoko.com/interview/20120605_berlant_lauren_on_cruel_optimism/.
• Ben Myers, “Interview with Lauren Berlant-Author of Cruel Optimism,” The Critical Lede (podcast),

https://thecriticallede.com/interview-with-lauren-berlant-author-of-cruel-optimism/

• “Affect in the End Times: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant,” Lauren Berlant and Jordan Greenwald, Qui Parle Spring/Summer 2012.
• Yubraj Aryal, “Interview with Lauren Berlant: Affect and the Political,” Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary InquiryVolume 7, Number 17 – 2012.
• Heather Davis and Paige Sarlin, Interview with Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt: 2 versions, "The Risk of a New Relationality" in BRIC (2012) and "No One is Sovereign in Love" in No More Potlucks (2011): http://nomorepotlucks.org/editorial/amour-no-18.
• “Claudia Rankine by Lauren Berlant, Bomb 129 (October 1, 2014) at https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2014/10/01/claudia-rankine/
• Jennifer Cooke and Lauren Berlant, “Politics, Teaching, Art and Writing: an Interview with Lauren Berlant", Textual Practice, 27(6), 961–970. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2013.830820
• Lauren Berlant with David Seitz, “Interview with Lauren Berlant,” (March 22, 2013), http://societyandspace.com/2013/03/22/interview-with-lauren-berlant/ (longer version)
• Lauren Berlant with David Seitz, “Lauren Berlant’s Queer Optimism,” in XTRA! (February 19, 2013) https://xtramagazine.com/power/lauren-berlants-queer-optimism-1224 (shorter verison)
• “The Blog as Experimental Setting: an interview with Lauren Berlant” in Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014).
• Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth A. Povinelli, "Holding Up the World, Part III: In the Event of Precarity … A Conversation," in E-flux 58 (October 2014): accessible at http://www.e-flux.com/journal/holding-up-the-world-part-iii-in-the-event-of-precarity- %e2%80%a6-a-conversation-between-elizabeth-povinelli-and-lauren-berlant/#.VD6e-KE8- ek.twitter
• Lauren Berlant and Jordan Alexander Stein, “Cruising Veganism,” GLQ 21.1 (2015): 18–23.
• Christa Robbins and Kris Cohen, “Beyond Formaldehyde, An Interview with Lauren Berlant,” Open Set 2015; http://www.open-set.com/cnrobbins/o-s-form-issue/an-interview-of-form-withlauren-berlant/
• IPAK Centar, “Interview with Lauren Berlant” youtube Nov 28, 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih4rkMSjmjs

• “Pleasure Won,” interview with Bea Malsky, The Point (2017). https://thepointmag.com/2017/politics/pleasure-won-conversation-lauren-berlant
• Affective Assemblages: Entanglements & Ruptures—An Interview with Lauren Berlant,” Atlantis 38, 2 (2017): 12-17.
• Nicholas Manning and Lauren Berlant, “Intensity is a signal, not a truth”: An interview with Lauren Berlant,” Revue française d’études américaines 2018/1 N° 154

https://shs.cairn.info/revue-francaise-d-etudes-americaines-2018-1-page-113?lang=en

• Berlant, L. (2019a). Interview with Lauren Berlant. Available from: https://tankmagazine.com/tank/2019/talks/lauren-berlant
• Berlant, L. (2019c). Why chasing the good life is holding us back [Interview]. Available from: https://news.uchicago.edu/podcasts/big-brains/ why-chasing-good-life-holding-us-back-lauren-ber
• Berlant, L. with Katarzyna Bojarska (2019). The Hundreds, observation, encounter, atmosphere, and world-making. Journal of Visual Culture, 18(3), 289-304. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412919875404
• Charlie Markbreiter, “Can’t Take a Joke: An interview with Lauren Berlant” The New Inquiry, March 22, 2019, https://thenewinquiry.com/cant-take-a-joke/
• Bessie Dernikos, “Intimacy and Depletion in the Pedagogical Scene: An Interview with Lauren Berlant,” 2020, Mapping the Affective Turn in Education: Theory, Research, and Pedagogies, ed. Bessie Dernikos, Nancy Lesko, Stephanie McCall, Alyssa Niccolini (Routledge, 2020), 247–250. ISBN 9781032237022
• Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Deborah Gould, Megan Boler & Elizabeth Davis (2022) On taking the affective turn: interview with Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, and Deborah Gould, Cultural Studies, 36:3, 360-377, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2040562

Work in translations

File:Cruel Optimism JP.jpg

Japanese translation of Cruel Optimism

See also

• Achille Mbembe
• Jasbir Puar
• Necropolitics

External links

• University of Chicago faculty page Template:Webarchive
• Lauren Berlant Papers—Pembroke Center Archives, Brown University
• Lauren Berlant CV (2018)

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