Lauren Berlant
George M. Pullman Professor
Department of English
Office: Walker 505
Phone: (773) 702-9760
l-berlant@uchicago.edu
My scholarship and teaching have focused on the legal and normative production of personhood in the U.S. nineteenth and twentieth centuries—now the twenty-first: in particular, citizenship, formal and informal. By formal I designate state, juridical, and institutional practices of zoning and more abstract boundary drawing—between public and private, or white and non-white, or citizen and foreigner. By informal citizenship I think about practices and norms of social belonging. My work looks at intimate publics and the affective practices that bind strangers to each other via triangulated relations to something that seems stable, like national, racial, sexual, gendered, and class identity. Some of these orientations toward identity’s distinguishing marks emerge from biopolitical historical distinctions—the more identified with bodiliness an American seems, the more likely that he/she belongs to a historically (formally and informally) subordinated population defined by its relation to normativity.
Therefore, citizenship and social belonging involve affective investments in practices of sociability and world-building that move beyond experiences of law and the conventions of ordinary identity: in mass culture, many modes of social membership flourish that circumvent politics while preserving critical and optimistic attachments to the political as a site of a vaguely rendered, collective imminence or ongoingness. I have finished a trilogy on national sentimentality now—the first and third in the series are The Anatomy of National Fantasy (Chicago, 1991) and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duke, 1997), and the second, The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, will appear in Spring of 2008.
I have also followed out this interest in collective attachments and affects in my edited volumes Intimacy (Chicago, 2000) and (with Lisa Duggan) Our Monica, Ourselves: Clinton and the Affairs of State (NYU, 2001). My next project is about the negative emotions that bind subjects to normativity despite the stresses of contemporary everyday life: Cruel Optimism is largely a book about affective experiences of neoliberalism, and their aesthetic mediations. It looks at ways of thinking about attachment and suffering that are structural and therefore misdescribed by the analytic of trauma and provides, I hope, more nuanced models for thinking the magnetism of unhappy people to binding modes of conventionality as they are lived and also manifested in fantasies of overcoming. Related to these matters is my edited volume, Compassion: the Culture and Politics of an Emotion (2004).
Imitation of Life
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Also related to the impact of these circuits of social exemplification is an interest in pedagogies of normativity in the academy, culture, and politics. I have just edited two volumes of Critical Inquiry called On the Case, which bring together leading thinkers to examine the “case”—the standard unit in law, medicine, psychoanalysis, the humanities, the sciences, and popular culture. What makes a case ordinary, easily dealt with, or forgettable? What makes some cases, and not others, challenges to the way ordinary life or institutional systems usually proceed? How do kinds of people become examples of kinds of thing? The project works through cases—of torture, of scientific paradigms, of OCD and Obesity, of the cinematic closeup, of literary personhood, of philosophical norms for adjudicating ethics, of servants, and gods, and lyric poetry, and sexuality. But all of the essays address their cases with an eye to understanding how cases have been and might be made.
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Courses:
Graduate: Ordinariness: An Introduction; The Intimate Public Sphere; The Case Study; The Literature of Trauma; From Sentimentality to Trauma: Aesthetic Legacies of American Liberalism; The Literature of Trauma; The US Historical Novel; Introduction to Theories of Sex & Gender.
Undergraduate: The Literature of Trauma; Form, Problem, and Event; Reading Cultures; Media Aesthetics; American Literature Survey I, 1630-1850; African-American Women Novelists; Problems in Gender Studies; What’s Love Got to Do with It?: The Genres of Modern Romance; Feminist Theory-Feminist Practice; Early American Novel; Realism and the Unsayable: Wharton, Cather, Parker; Utopias.
Selected Publications:
- The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Duke UP, 2008).
- “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, http://www.nd.edu/~ghendler/keywords.html (forthcoming; 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).
- Compassion, ed. (Routledge, 2004).
- Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest. Ed. with Lisa Duggan (NYU Press, 2001).
- Venus Inferred, with Laura Letinsky (University of Chicago, 2000).
- “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).
- Editor, “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” Critical Inquiry (Winter 1998).
- “The Female Complaint,” Social Text 19/20 (Fall 1988).
- “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).
- The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago, 1991).
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Education:
Ph.D., Cornell University, 1985. Teaching at Chicago since 1984.
Department of English
The University of Chicago
1115 East 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637 |
© 2008 The University of Chicago
Last updated: March 2008 |
