Cruel Optimism Lauren Berlant
Publisher: Duke University Press Books

An affective portrait of the 99%. But the concept is readily applicable to larger groups of people as in her analysis of slow death. Feb 27, 2012 - Lauren Berlant's latest book, Cruel Optimism, is less brutal analysis than a dark, lush still-life of American fantasies and our Quixotic lunges toward them. Apr 9, 2012 - Product Descriptionp/pDIVA relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. May 16, 2014 - The team that knocked them out was Atlético Madrid, which is cause for optimism at the Calderón. Oct 2, 2010 - In “Cruel Optimism,” Berlant examines cases of individual person's cruel attachment. Nov 1, 2011 - And so, for Berlant, the concepts of love and optimism foreground the sort of difficulties and investments involved in creating social change, understood as the construction of an attachment to a world that we don't know yet, but that we hope will . The 'good life' is a fallacy and is, in fact, something that holds us hostage. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Duke 2009); Cruel Optimism (Duke, 2011); Desire/Love (Punctum 2013); and, with Lee Edelman Sex, of the Unbearable (Duke 2013). Dec 12, 2013 - These tropes and discursive elements generate an affective mode which Lauren Berlant aptly identifies as 'cruel optimism'. The Female Complaint (Duke University Press, 2008, Durham) — has now morphed into a quartet, with Cruel Optimism (2011) addressing precarious publics and the aesthetics of affective adjustment in the contemporary U.S. Jul 11, 2012 - To borrow a phrase from literary theorist Lauren Berlant, our relation to technology today might be described as one of “cruel optimism.”4 For Berlant, cruel optimism characterizes contemporary American culture. Nov 9, 2008 - This responds to a slew of emails and links I've received warning of left wing stupidity and complacence in the wake of Obama's election. Dec 27, 2013 - Lauren Berlant, in her profoundly focused 2011 text Cruel Optimism, outlined what she called the slow death of the American worker who must fight for life with the means of the cruelly ironic living-wage. May 25, 2012 - In recent work Berlant has written about the notion of 'cruel optimism'. Jan 6, 2014 - This idea of optimism, this idea of 'a good life', is what Lauren Berlant talks about in her book Cruel Optimism. She says that a relation of cruel optimism exists “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing”.