Showing papers by "Lauren Berlant published in 2008"

The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture

Abstract: 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.

The female complaint

Abstract: Imagine my dismay when I was virtually booed off the stage by a feminist audience of the lesbian-separatist variety for reading a series of poems that celebrated pregnancy and birth while affirming a woman's strength and power. The poems in no way idealized pregnancy, but you couldn't prove it by an audience of women in rebellion against fifties notions of happy motherhood. To say anything positive about motherhood was to push every one of their emotional buttons. I left the stage devastated and confused ... This experience plunged me into one of the deepest depressions of my life (and did, by the way, end my career as a nursing mother).1

Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event

Abstract: The essay to follow takes as its literary archive two novels that are, in some strong sense, about the US: Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1998) and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003). However, it claims no interest in contributing to “American Literary History,” insofar as that project sees the US as the protagonist of its own story or even as the magnet that organizes stories about it, however chaotically. Rather, this essay takes on the linked problem of writing the history of the present and the literary history of the present. It sees this problem as a problem of affect, a problem of apprehending heightened moments in which certain locales become exemplary laboratories for sensing or intuiting contemporary life. Sometimes such locales can be national—for example, the nation can be seen as one of the locales of globalization, a place where forces are managed, processes settle, and things happen. But even from that perspective the national is lived simultaneously in diffused and specific places as well as in bodies that are working out the terms of what it means to feel and to be historical at a particular moment. This essay’s interest is in the historical sense, particularly of the present—any present, even a past one. How does a particular affective response come to be exemplary of a shared historical time, and in what terms? On the face of it, affect theory has no place in the work of literary, or any, history. Gilles Deleuze writes, after all, that affects act in the nervous system not of persons, but of worlds. Brian Massumi posits the nervous system as so autonomous that affective acts cannot be intended (35–36). Yet, as they and Teresa Brennan—writing from another tradition—argue, affective atmospheres are shared. For the purposes of this brief essay my claim

Hard Feelings: Stephanie Brooks

Abstract: This essay on Stephanie Brooks's art is also a meditation on affect, emotion, for malism, and feminism, all of which her art makes you wonder about. Brooks's work often takes the shape of a series, a series not shaped by genre, exactly, but by form, form being a kind of repetition that induces the double take of recogni tion because events become predictable during the stretched-out absorption of aesthetic time (oh, that sound again, that line, that shape, that feeling). Her work takes up book shapes, poem shapes, forms from ordinary life that usually induce inattention because of their reliable intelligibility. But here they call out from their cool stability toward something else: the kinds of sharp outrage that can tip over pleasure at the edge of a joke. But it would be easy not to catch this critical drift, this angry floating mote, because the works' practice of formal reenactment often convolutes feeling as it extends form. It recalls artwork like Jenny Holzer's or Barbara Kruger's without being much like that work, which is very noisy. Brooks's practice of formalism opens up unusual questions about how engaged art works: it reenacts ordinary sights on behalf of interfering with ordinary affects and feelings without manifesting those scenes explicitly. If implicitation weren't already a word, it would be invented to describe the activity of Brooks's body of work. But Brooks's process is a paradox, since the work is so formal and so verbal, so out there and yet so mild, in the way it juts out into and interferes with space. What hails your attention often points to reten tion. I proceed with some examples of her art of extroverted withdrawal, of giv ing as withholding, of providing formal comforts while detaching the comforting affects from their very anchors. Art history-literate viewers of Brooks's work will immediately read its for malism in the context of two traditions. On one side, one sees the mark of Dadaesque deployments of cliched word and image, outrage and iconoclasm, and anti-bourgeois counter-conventionalism; on the other, the minimalist tradition in sculpture and painting, with its emphasis on affirmation in negation, erasure, pure