Showing papers by "Lauren Berlant published in 2022"

On the Inconvenience of Other People

Abstract: In On the Inconvenience of Other People Lauren Berlant continues to explore our affective engagement with the world. Berlant focuses on the encounter with and the desire for the bother of other people and objects, showing that to be driven toward attachment is to desire to be inconvenienced. Drawing on a range of sources, including Last Tango in Paris, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Claudia Rankine, Christopher Isherwood, Bhanu Kapil, the Occupy movement, and resistance to anti-Black state violence, Berlant poses inconvenience as an affective relation and considers how we might loosen our attachments in ways that allow us to build new forms of life. Collecting strategies for breaking apart a world in need of disturbing, the book’s experiments in thought and writing cement Berlant’s status as one of the most inventive and influential thinkers of our time.

Some stories, more scenes

Abstract: We write to conjure a poetics of scenes at once social, dreamy, mattering, and incidental. Our collaborative project is about feeling and testing out the moments we move around in and the speculations we bring to them, generating scenes of life that are ideas of life. We try out practices of looser and sharper processing what we’ve seen, smelled, overheard, conjured. To move and conceptualize from within worlds is preferable to drawing a plane above them. Toggling across what’s starting up or falling away in a present closely noted creates a fractal, fractious narrative, if there’s a narrative at all. It might produce a story sense that stretches the social and political into a resource for living.

The colloquy of little books

Abstract: Joan Didion once explained the famous calculated brevity of her style by telling The Paris Review that “I always aim for a reading in one sitting” (2006, 77). Didion was clearly echoing Edgar Allan Poe’s dictum in “The Philosophy of Composition,” where he argued that “there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art— the limit of a single sitting.” “It appears evident,” Poe claimed, that the proper length for any literary work of art is “about one hundred lines,” and in a kind of mathematical proof of his own poem “The Raven,” Poe set out to describe the precise poetical effect produced in the duration of that precise one hundred (Poe, 546). The question of length— particularly the relation of length to affect and reception— appears to be on the academic hive mind lately. More to the point: it appears “the short form” is the dominant critical academic and fictional mode du jour. Minimalism is having a moment. Contemporary writers like Rachel Cusk, Lydia Davis, Jenny Offill, and Sarah Manguso are acclaimed for their aphoristic, distilled prose; their use of fragments; and attention to white space— a strategic style of reticence reminiscent of modernist fiction and the postmodern “flash cuts” (Didion’s term) that is trending in a current return to writers like Renata Adler, Natalia Ginzburg, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Fleur Jaggy, with books typically “clocking in at a sharp 101 pages” (Phillips), or nearly so. A plenary at the 2020 American Comparative Literature Association on “The Short Form” promises to scrutinize a series of short forms currently on trend, including “the tweet, the bumper sticker, and