Cruel Optimism
by Berlant, Lauren
- New
- Condition
- New
- ISBN 10
- 0822351110
- ISBN 13
- 9780822351115
- Seller
-
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
56 Copies Available from This Seller
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
Synopsis
A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life—with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy—despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives “add up to something.” Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory—with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary—is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present.
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Details
- Bookseller
- Russell Books Ltd (CA)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- ING9780822351115
- Title
- Cruel Optimism
- Author
- Berlant, Lauren
- Book Condition
- New
- Quantity Available
- 56
- Binding
- Paperback
- ISBN 10
- 0822351110
- ISBN 13
- 9780822351115
- Publisher
- Duke University Pr
- Place of Publication
- Durham, NC
- This edition first published
- 2011-10
Terms of Sale
Russell Books Ltd
About the Seller
Russell Books Ltd
About Russell Books Ltd
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- New
- A new book is a book previously not circulated to a buyer. Although a new book is typically free of any faults or defects, "new"...