Based on her own disappointment with letters. You do not currently have access to this chapter. well as how the process of letter writing becomes exemplary of Lauren Berlants theorization of cruel optimism. 'Cruel Optimism', The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg, Gregory J. Cruel Optimism Lippert, Leopold 00:00:00 DOI 10.1515/kl-2013-0021 Kritikon Litterarum 2013 40(12): 141144 could answer various overarching questions, including how postmodernists engagements with apocalypticism extend, revise, or otherwise relate to those of modernists. and i'd say 'the promise of the object' made the meaning of cruel optimism clearest for me. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools. her articulations of the historical present and lateral agency were especially compelling. but, oh, apparently that's how she wanted it to feel. Review 2: this was an epic read, each chapter was exhausting in its own right. Nevertheless, this is a book that is worth sitting with and mulling over, even in its most painful moments. I still can't get this image out of my head. You become like a small animal that, when picked up, never stops moving its legs" (127). write Desire/Love, The Female Complaint, Cruel Optimism, and. It locates you at the knot that joins the personal and the impersonal, specifying you at the moment you have the least control over your own destiny and meaning. Lauren Berlant and Laura Letinsky have collaborated on two projects since the late 1990s. As an example, trauma, in Berlant's styling, is described as something that "can never be let go of: it holds you. more olitics" that she analyzes in the final chapter seem, as she admits, "minor," but they offer a possible avenue for "changing the white noise of politics into something alive right now can magnetize people to induce images of the good life amidst the exhausting pragmatics of the ordinary's 'new normal'" (261).I recommend reading Cruel Optimism in small doses, both to be able to fully immerse yourself in Berlant's unique prose and to allow yourself a break from her exceptional skill at making you feel exactly what the characters in the films or books she is analyzing are feeling. What she isn't as good at is saving her readers from a visceral sense of the precarious present, but that is part of the point. Berlant traces this "attrition of a fantasy, a collectively invested form of life, the good life" through an diverse assortment of novels and films, masterfully weaving together her analysis of these art forms with an assessment of the present moment (11). Her style is visceral and unflinching, "manifest" in her readers a sense of the "unbinding of subjects from their economic and intimate optimism" that is characteristic of the "situation of contemporary life" (7, 9). Review 1: To say that Cruel Optimism left me feeling bruised and exhausted is not necessarily bad indeed, I think that was partially Berlant's intent.
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