Scholia has a profile forLauren Berlant(Q12237573).

Lauren Gail Berlant^[1] (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."^[2][3] Berlant was theGeorge M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at theUniversity of Chicago, where they^[a] taught from 1984 until 2021.^[4] Berlant wrote and taught issues of intimacy and belonging inpopular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy ofcitizenship.^[5]

Berlant wrote onpublic spheres as they affect worlds, whereaffect 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 was born on October 31, 1957, inPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania.^[1][6] They graduated with a BA in English fromOberlin College in 1979,^[7] then an MA fromCornell 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] (They said student loans obliged them to continue straight through school without a break that would have triggered loan repayment.)^[6] Berlant's dissertation was titled,Executing The Love Plot: Hawthorne and The Romance of Power (1985).^[8]

Berlant taught at theUniversity of Chicago from 1984 to 2021, becoming the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English.^[4] 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).^[9]

Berlant's other honors included aGuggenheim Fellowship and, for their bookCruel Optimism, theRené Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association^[6] and the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award from theModern Language Association (MLA) for the best book in queer studies in literature or cultural studies.^[10] Berlant was elected to theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.^[6]

Berlant was a founding member of Feel Tank Chicago in 2002, a play onthink tank.^[4] They worked with many journals, including (as editor)Critical Inquiry.^[6] They also edited Duke University Press's Theory Q series along withLee Edelman,Benjamin Kahan, andChristina Sharpe.

Berlant was the author of a national sentimentality trilogy beginning withThe Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 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 onNathaniel Hawthorne's work to illustrate these operations.^[11]

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^[12]—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.^[13] In his review,José Muñoz described it as bothintersectional, followingKimberlé Crenshaw, and "post-Habermassian", in the vein of work byNancy Fraser and Berlant's frequent collaboratorMichael Warner.^[13] Berlant's third book (though second in the trilogy),^[14]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 byErma Bombeck andFanny Fern, who skewered married life for women in nearly identical ways despite being separated by 150 years.^[15] 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.^[14] Berlant took up this project by examining especially melodramas and their remade movies in the first part of the twentieth century, such asShow Boat,Imitation of Life, andUncle Tom's Cabin.^[14]

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 asneoliberalism wears away the fantasies of upward mobility associated with the liberal state.^[16] 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.^[17] 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.^[18]

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.^[17] 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)."^[19]

In 2019, Berlant publishedThe 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.^[4] InThe New Yorker,Hua Hsu said the book "calls to mind the adventurous, hybrid style ofFred Moten (the book includes a brief poem by him),Maggie Nelson, orClaudia Rankine, all of whom bend available literary forms into workable vessels for new ideas."^[4]

Berlant has edited books onCompassion (2004) andIntimacy (2001), which are interlinked with their seminal work in feminist andqueer theory in essays like "What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?" (with Michael Warner, 1995),^[20] "Sex in Public" (with Michael Warner, 1998),^[21]Our Monica, Ourselves: Clinton and the Affairs of State (edited withLisa Duggan, 2001),^[22] andVenus Inferred (with photographerLaura Letinsky, 2001).^[23]

Berlant died ofcancer in a Chicago hospice facility on June 28, 2021, at age 63.^[1][6][24] They are survived by their partner Ian Horswill.^[9]

Berlant's papers are held at the Feminist Theory Archive of thePembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women atBrown University. Berlant began donating them in 2014.^[25]

Books authored:

• The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life, University of Chicago Press, 1991.
• The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, Duke University Press, 1997.
• Venus Inferred, withLaura Letinsky, University of Chicago Press, 2000.
• The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Duke University Press, 2008.
• Cruel Optimism, Duke University Press, 2011.
• Desire/Love, Punctum Books, 2012.
• Sex; or, the Unbearable, withLee Edelman, Duke University Press, 2014.
• The Hundreds, with Kathleen Stewart, Duke University Press, 2019.
• On The Inconvenience of Other People, Duke University Press, 2022.

Edited:

• The Black Public Sphere (as editorial member of the Black Public Sphere Collective), University of Chicago Press, 1997.
• Intimacy, University of Chicago Press, 2001.
• Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest, withLisa Duggan, NYU Press, 2001.
• “Violence and Redemption,” (as editorial member of the Late Liberalism Collective),Public Culture 15.1 (2003).
• Compassion, Selected Papers from the English Institute, Routledge, 2004.
• “On the Case,” two-volume special issue ofCritical Inquiry, 33.4, 34.1 (2007).
• “Comedy: An Issue,” with Sianne Ngai,Critical Inquiry, 43.2 (2017).
• Reading Sedgwick, Duke University Press, 2019.

• "Love as a Properly Political Concept" (Response to Michael Hardt), Cultural Anthropology (2011)
• "Affect and the Politics of Austerity", Variant 38/40, with Gesa Helms, Marina Vischmidt (2011)
• "Opulism", SAQ (2010)
• "Neither Monstrous nor Pastoral, but Scary and Sweet: Some Thoughts on Sex and Emotional Performance in Intimacies and What Do Gay Men Want?" Women and Performance (2009)
• "Affect Is the New Trauma", The Minnesota Review (2009). Rpt. 2010.
• "The Broken Circuit: An Interview with Lauren Berlant", by Sina Najafi and David Serlin, Cabinet (2008).
• "Thinking about Feeling Historical", Emotion, Space, and Society 1, 1 (2008). Rpt. Political Emotions, ed., Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann Reynolds (2010).
• "Risky Bigness: On Obesity, Eating, and the Ambiguity of "Health", in Jonathan Metzl et al., Against Health/ (NYU, 2010).
• "Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta" Public Culture 19, 2 (2007): 272-301.
• Keyword, "Citizenship", in Keywords of American Cultural Studies, Edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (NYU press, 2007).
• "Cruel Optimism", Differences 17, 5 (2006): 21-36; and New Formations (2008; longer version).
• "Starved", SAQ 106:3 (2007), 433-444.
• "Slow Death", in Critical Inquiry 33 (Summer 2007): 754-780.
• The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duke UP, 1997).
• "Unfeeling Kerry", Theory and Event 8, 2 (2005).
• "The Epistemology of State Emotion", in Dissent in Dangerous Times, ed. Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
• "Two Girls, Fat and Thin", in Regarding Sedgwick, eds. Stephen Barber and David Clark (New York: Routledge, 2002).
• "Love (A Queer Feeling)", Psychoanalysis and Homosexuality, eds. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago, 2000), 432-451.
• "Sex in Public." Written with Michael Warner. Critical Inquiry (Winter 1998).
• "Poor Eliza", in American Literature (1998).
• "Pax Americana: The Case of Show Boat", in Institutions of the Novel (Duke UP, 1997).
• "The Female Woman: Fanny Fern and the Form of Sentiment", in The Culture of Sentiment (Oxford, 1993).
• "National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life", in The Phantom Public Sphere (Minnesota UP, 1993).

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