Remembering Lauren Berlant

Biography ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
Riva Lehrer
Keyword(s):  
Lauren Berlant

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew van der Vlies
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Don Delillo ◽  
The Road ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Lauren Berlant ◽  
Postcolonial Politics

This chapter considers the representation of impasse in three novels by Ingrid Winterbach, widely fêted in South Africa as one of its leading Afrikaans-language writers: Die boek van toeval en toeverlaat (2006; The Book of Happenstance, 2008); Die benederyk (2010; The Road of Excess, 2014); Die aanspraak van lewende wesens (2012; It Might Get Loud, 2015). It discusses the forms of precarious life at issue in these texts, and tests the usefulness of work by Lauren Berlant (on the ‘cruel optimism’ of neoliberal social life; on the cultural forms—including the ‘situation tragedy’—that reflect it) and David Scott (on the tragic nature of post-utopian postcolonial politics) for reading it. This chapter introduces a key concern of the book, the intertextuality through which its writers participate in local and global conversations (here involving J.M. Coetzee and Don DeLillo).

scholarly journals Han and/as Ressentiment: Lessons from Minjung Theology

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 72
Author(s):  
Sam Han
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Liberation Theology ◽  
Latin American ◽  
English Language ◽  
Minjung Theology ◽  
Korean People ◽  
American Counterpart ◽  
Theological Perspective ◽  
Cultural Concept ◽  
Lauren Berlant

Following calls in recent critical debates in English-language Korean studies to reevaluate the cultural concept of han (often translated as “resentment”), this article argues for its reconsideration from the vantage point of minjung theology, a theological perspective that emerged in South Korea in the 1970s, which has been dubbed the Korean version of “liberation theology”. Like its Latin American counterpart, minjung theology understood itself in explicitly political terms, seeking to reinvigorate debates around the question of theodicy—the problem of suffering vis-à-vis the existence of a divine being or order. Studying some of the ways in which minjung theologians connected the concept of han to matters of suffering, this article argues, offers an opening towards a redirection from han’s dominant understanding within academic discourse and public culture as a special and unique racial essence of Korean people. Moreover, by putting minjung theology in conversation with contemporary political theory, in particular the works of Wendy Brown and Lauren Berlant, this article hopes to bring minjung theology to the attention of critical theory.

Queer Life? Ecocriticism After the Fire

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catriona Sandilands
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Ecological Thinking ◽  
Lauren Berlant

This article examines the relevance of queer theory and “queer ecological” trajectories to ecocriticism. It analyzes Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s formative thoughts in “Sex in Public” and proposes some “radical aspirations” of queer nature building. It outlines a “queer life” for ecocriticism and provides a reading of Jane Rule’s novel After the Fire, which engages directly with both the ontological and the political dimensions of queer ecological thinking.

scholarly journals DANTES LITTERÆRE ATMOSFÆROLOGI

1970 ◽  
Vol 41 (116) ◽  
pp. 33-48
Author(s):  
Dennis Meyhoff Brink
Keyword(s):  
Divine Comedy ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Peter Sloterdijk ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The One ◽  
Atmospheric Phenomena ◽  
Lauren Berlant

DANTE’S LITERARY ATMOSPHEROLOGY | The article argues that recent theories on affect and atmosphere by, for instance, Teresa Brennan, Lauren Berlant, and Peter Sloterdijk, can enter into an extraordinarily fruitful interchange with Dante’s Divine Comedy. On the one hand, these theories can direct our attention to the hitherto overlooked atmospheric phenomena that occur ubiquitously in Dante’s Comedy and provide us with concepts that render them legible as products of human emissions. On the other hand, the numerous descriptions of different atmospheres in Dante’s Comedy can contribute to overcoming the lack of linguistic specifications and distinctions which – according to theorists such as Brian Massumi and Peter Sloterdijk – characterizes today’s Western understanding of affective atmospheres and impedes its ongoing theorization. Based on readings of a selected number of atmospheres in Dante’s Comedy, the article argues that the Comedy not only anticipated insights that were not articulated theoretically until the twentieth and twenty-first century, butalso makes up an exceptional encyclopedia of affective atmospheres that have not yet been examined, neither by Dante researchers, nor by theorists of affects and atmospheres. Therefore, both camps have much to learn from Dante’s literary atmospherology, which the article aims to make explicit.

Sex, or the Unbearable by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman

2014 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 136-137
Author(s):  
Fiona I. B. Ngô
Keyword(s):  
Lauren Berlant

Queer Worldmaking

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hailey N. Otis ◽  
Thomas R. Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
Foundational Work ◽  
Lauren Berlant

The theory and practice of queer worldmaking is a vital part of the study of queer communication. Rooted in the acts, activism, artistry, and the everyday lives of LGBT+, queer, and proto-queer people across the world, the theorization of queer worldmaking emerged alongside the founding of queer theory itself in the late 1990s. Surfacing in both José Esteban Muñoz’s writing on minoritarian performance and disidentification as well as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s essay, “Sex in Public,” the term “queer worldmaking” was quickly taken up in communication scholarship, driving Gust Yep’s foundational work on “The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication Studies.” Evolving according to various disciplinary demands and cultural influences, contemporary endeavors in queer worldmaking in communication studies largely follow three general paths: (a) drawing upon quare/queer of color theories to theorize worldmaking through/as enactments of disidentification(s), queer futurity, queer utopias, hope, and queer relationality; (b) conceptualizing academia, scholarship, and academic pursuits as productive sites for envisioning and creating queer worlds; and (c) tending to the worldmaking potentialities of queer memories, monuments, and archives. These intellectual pathways overlap, interweave, and split off into unpredictable rhizomatic directions, paving the way for scholarship that converses with, diverges from, and pushes forward queer worldmaking in communication studies in curiously queer directions.

Does Queer Political Theory Have a Future?

Shame ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogdan Popa
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Future ◽  
Eve Sedgwick ◽  
Lauren Berlant

In this final chapter I reflect upon the possibilities unleashed by recent scholarship in queer political theory. First, I discuss the future of queer political thinking by insisting that the act of interpretation has to draw on how one becomes both irritated by and surprised by scholarly arguments. As an affective practice, irritation offers the incentive to challenge what is already known while the surprise opens up a new territory for investigation. Second, to enact my interpretative method, I critically engage with the work of Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, José Esteban Muñoz, and Lauren Berlant to argue that queer practices can articulate an equality-oriented vision of politics.

From Paper to Pixel

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Susan Zieger
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
Eve Sedgwick ◽  
Ink Blot ◽  
Lauren Berlant

The introduction lays out the book’s terms, critical concerns, method, and historical and theoretical contexts. Explaining how printed ephemera transformed the texture of everyday middle- and working-class life throughout the nineteenth century, peaking in the 1860s and 1890s, it then shows how affect, itself an ephemeral human condition, registered the new social relations that mass media reorganized. The introduction explains the book’s engagement with theorists of media and mass media such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Marx Horkheimer, and Friedrich Kittler; and theorists of affect and mass culture such as Eve Sedgwick, Lauren Berlant, and Kathleen Stewart. It describes the cultural evidence the book assembles, such as temperance medals, cigarette cards, ink blot games, and novels; and describes each chapter.

Acedia and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King

2019 ◽  
pp. 241-266
Author(s):  
Zuzanna Ladyga
Keyword(s):  
Book Industry ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Ideological Critique ◽  
Lauren Berlant

David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King (2011) employs the trope of acedia as the mode of its literary subjectivity. The analysis in this chapter focuses on Wallace’s detailed study of psychosomatic and bodily disorders by means of which his characters (IRS officers) manifest their resistance to their Bartlebesque lives. Given the consistency with which the bodies of the novel’s characters are exposed to hypertension, both from without and from within, it is clear that the object of The Pale King’s ideological critique is not capitalism in general, but its intervention into our biological life. In this way, the haptic serves as a poetic means in Wallace’s critique of biopower, the extent of whose intrusion into the intimate sphere of his characters’ lives is laid bare in the disorderly ways their bodies’ muscular, digestive and neurological systems respond to external and internalized discipline. The result of this poetic strategy is that the novel creates a series of micro events of what Lauren Berlant calls “self-interruption” which guard the agency of the subject and the author against interpellative calls of the book industry for self-exploitation and productivity

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