Lauren Gail Berlant (October 31, 1957 – June 28, 2021) was an American scholar,

cultural theorist Culture theory is the branch of comparative anthropology and semiotics (not to be confused with cultural sociology or cultural studies) that seeks to define the heuristic concept of culture in operational and/or scientific terms. Overview In ...

, and author who is regarded as "one of the most esteemed and influential literary and cultural critics in the United States." Berlant was the

George M. Pullman George Mortimer Pullman (March 3, 1831 – October 19, 1897) was an American engineer and industrialist. He designed and manufactured the Pullman sleeping car and founded a company town, Pullman, for the workers who manufactured it. This ulti ...

Distinguished Service Professor of English at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

, where they taught from 1984 until 2021. Berlant wrote and taught issues of intimacy and belonging in

popular culture Popular culture (also called mass culture or pop culture) is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of practices, beliefs, artistic output (also known as, popular art or mass art) and objects that are dominant or prevalent in a ...

, in relation to the history and fantasy of

citizenship Citizenship is a "relationship between an individual and a state to which the individual owes allegiance and in turn is entitled to its protection". Each state determines the conditions under which it will recognize persons as its citizens, and ...

. Berlant wrote on

public sphere The public sphere (german: Öffentlichkeit) is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. A "Public" is "of or concerning th ...

s as they affect worlds, where affect and emotion lead the way for belonging ahead of the modes of rational or deliberative thought. These attach strangers to each other and shape the terms of the state-civil society relation.

Early life and education

Berlant was born on October 31, 1957, in

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

. They graduated with a BA in English from

Oberlin College Oberlin College is a Private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college and conservatory of music in Oberlin, Ohio. It is the oldest Mixed-sex education, coeducational liberal arts college in the United S ...

in 1979, then an MA from

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

in 1983, and finally a PhD from Cornell in 1985, after they had already begun teaching at the University of Chicago. (They said student loans obliged them to continue straight through school without a break that would have triggered loan repayment.) Berlant's dissertation was titled, ''Executing The Love Plot: Hawthorne and The Romance of Power'' (1985).

Career

Berlant taught at the

from 1984 to 2021, becoming the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English. The university awarded them a Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1989), a Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring (2005), and the Norman Maclean Faculty Award (2019). Berlant's other honors included a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

and, for their book ''Cruel Optimism'', the

René Wellek René Wellek (August 22, 1903 – November 10, 1995) was a Czech- American comparative literary critic. Like Erich Auerbach, Wellek was an eminent product of the Central European philological tradition and was known as a vastly erudite and ...

Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association and the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award from the

Modern Language Association The Modern Language Association of America, often referred to as the Modern Language Association (MLA), is widely considered the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature. The MLA aims to "st ...

(MLA) for the best book in queer studies in literature or cultural studies. Berlant was elected to the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

in 2018. Berlant was a founding member of Feel Tank Chicago in 2002, a play on

think tank A think tank, or policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture. Most think tanks are non-governmenta ...

. They worked with many journals, including (as editor) ''Critical Inquiry''. They also edited Duke University Press's Theory Q series along with

Lee Edelman Lee Edelman (born 1953) is an American literary critic and academic. He serves as a professor of English at Tufts University. He is the author of four books. Early life Lee Edelman was born in 1953. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree fr ...

Benjamin Kahan Benjamin ( he, ''Bīnyāmīn''; "Son of (the) right")blue letter bible: https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/h3225/kjv/wlc/0-1/ H3225 - yāmîn - Strong's Hebrew Lexicon (kjv) was the last of the two sons of Jacob and Rachel (Jacob's thirt ...

, and

Christina Sharpe Christina Elizabeth Sharpe is an American academic who is a professor of English literature and Black Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Education Sharpe received a bachelor's degree in English and Africana studies from the Univer ...

Works

Berlant was the author of a national sentimentality trilogy beginning with ''The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life'' (University of Chicago Press, 1991). Based on their dissertation, the book looks at the formation of national identity as the relations between modes of belonging mediated by the state and law; by aesthetics, especially genre; and by the everyday life of social relations, drawing on

Nathaniel Hawthorne Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion. He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, from a family long associated with that t ...

's work to illustrate these operations. ''The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship''—the title essay winning the 1993 Norman Foerster Award for best essay of the year in American literature—introduced the idea of the "intimate public sphere" and looks at the production of politics and publicness since the Reagan era by way of the circulation of the personal, the sexual, and the intimate. In his review, José Muñoz described it as both

intersectional Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how aspects of a person's social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of adv ...

, following

Kimberlé Crenshaw Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (born May 5, 1959) is an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender iss ...

, and "post- Habermassian", in the vein of work by

Nancy Fraser Nancy Fraser (; born May 20, 1947) is an American philosopher, critical theorist, feminist, and the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science and professor of philosophy at The New School in New York City.Jadžić, Milo� ...

and Berlant's frequent collaborator

Michael Warner Michael David Warner (born 1958) is an American literary critic, social theorist, and Seymour H. Knox Professor of English Literature and American Studies at Yale University. He also writes for ''Artforum'', ''The Nation'', '' The Advocate'', and ...

. Berlant's third book (though second in the trilogy), ''The Female Complaint: On the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture'' was published by Duke University Press in 2008. The project initially began in the 1980s when Berlant noticed striking similarities in writing by

Erma Bombeck Erma Louise Bombeck (''née'' Fiste; February 21, 1927 – April 22, 1996) was an American humorist who achieved great popularity for her newspaper humor column describing suburban home life, syndicated from 1965 to 1996. She also published 15 b ...

and

Fanny Fern Fanny Fern (born Sara Payson Willis; July 9, 1811 – October 10, 1872), was an American novelist, children's writer, humorist, and newspaper columnist in the 1850s to 1870s. Her popularity has been attributed to a conversational style and sense ...

, who skewered married life for women in nearly identical ways despite being separated by 150 years. Berlant pursued this mass cultural phenomenon of "women's culture" as an originating site of “intimate publics", threading the everyday institutions of intimacy, mass society, and, more distantly and ambivalently, politics through fantasies rather than ideology. Berlant took up this project by examining especially melodramas and their remade movies in the first part of the twentieth century, such as ''Show Boat'', ''Imitation of Life'', and ''

Uncle Tom's Cabin ''Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly'' is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in two volumes in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U. ...

''. Berlant's 2011 book, ''Cruel Optimism'' (Duke University Press) works its way across the U.S. and Europe to assess the level of contemporary crisis as

neoliberalism Neoliberalism (also neo-liberalism) is a term used to signify the late 20th century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism after it fell into decline following the Second World War. A prominent fa ...

wears away the fantasies of upward mobility associated with the liberal state. Cruel optimism manifests as a relational dynamic in which individuals create attachment as "clusters of promises" toward desired object-ideas even when they inhibit the conditions for flourishing and fulfilling such promises. Maintaining attachments that sustain the good life fantasy, no matter how injurious or cruel these attachments may be, allows people to make it through day-to-day life when the day-to-day has become unlivable. Elaborating on the specific dynamics of cruel optimism, Berlant emphasizes and maintains that it is not the object itself, but rather the relationship:

A relation of cruel optimism is a double-bind in which your attachment to an object sustains you in life at the same time as that object is actually a threat to your flourishing. So you can't say that there are objects that have the quality of cruelty or not cruelty, it's how you have the relationship to them. Like it might be that being in a couple is not a relation of cruel optimism for you, because being in a couple actually makes you feel like you have a grounding in the world, whereas for other people, being in a couple might be, on the one hand, a relief from loneliness, and on the other hand, the overpresence of one person who has to bear the burden of satisfying all your needs. So it's not the object that's the problem, but how we learn to be in relation.

An emphasis on the "present", which Berlant describes as structured through "crisis ordinariness", turns to affect and aesthetics as a way of apprehending these crises. Berlant suggests that it becomes possible to recognize that certain "genres" are no longer sustainable in the present and that new emergent aesthetic forms are taking hold that allow us to recognize modes of living not rooted in normative good life fantasies. Discussing crisis ordinariness, Berlant described it as their way "of talking about traumas of the social that are lived through collectively and that transform the sensorium to a heightened perceptiveness about the unfolding of the historical, and sometimes historic, moment (and sometimes publics organized around those senses, when experienced collectively)." In 2019, Berlant published ''The Hundreds'' with Kathleen Stewart, a collection of brief writing (a hundred words or a multiple of a hundred words) on ordinary encounters, applying affect theory to moments of unexamined daily life. In ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

'',

Hua Hsu Hua Hsu (born 1977) is an American writer and academic, based in New York City. He is a professor of English at Bard College and a staff writer at ''The New Yorker''. His work includes investigations of immigrant culture in the United States, as ...

said the book "calls to mind the adventurous, hybrid style of

Fred Moten Fred Moten (born 1962) is an American cultural theorist, poet, and scholar whose work explores critical theory, black studies, and performance studies. Moten is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and Distinguished Professor ...

(the book includes a brief poem by him),

Maggie Nelson Maggie Nelson (born 1973) is an American writer. She has been described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aes ...

, or

Claudia Rankine Claudia Rankine (; born September 4, 1963) is an American poet, essayist, playwright and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays and various essays. Her book of poetry, '' Citizen: An American L ...

, all of whom bend available literary forms into workable vessels for new ideas." Berlant has edited books on ''Compassion'' (2004) and ''Intimacy'' (2001), which are interlinked with their seminal work in feminist and queer theory in essays like "What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?" (with Michael Warner, 1995), "Sex in Public" (with Michael Warner, 1998), ''Our Monica, Ourselves: Clinton and the Affairs of State'' (edited with

Lisa Duggan Lisa Duggan () is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Duggan was president of the American Studies Association from 2014 to 2015, presiding over the annual conference on the theme of "The Fun and the Fury: New Diale ...

, 2001), and ''Venus Inferred'' (with photographer

Laura Letinsky Laura L. Letinsky (born 1962) is an artist and a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. She is currently based in Chicago, Illinois where she lives and works. Letinsky’s works contend with what and how a phot ...

, 2001).

Death

Berlant died of

cancer Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Possible signs and symptoms include a lump, abnormal b ...

in a Chicago hospice facility on June 28, 2021, at age 63. They are survived by their partner Ian Horswill. Berlant's papers are held at the Feminist Theory Archive of the

Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women The Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women was established in 1981 at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, as an interdisciplinary research center focused on gender and women. In addition to research, the center is home to arc ...

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

. Berlant began donating them in 2014.

Bibliography

Books

* * * * * 2011 René Wellek Prize, American Comparative Literature Association * * * *

Edited collections

* * * *

Notes

References

External links

University of Chicago faculty page
!-- Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20210628170843/https://english.uchicago.edu/people/lauren-berlant -->
Berlant's blog, Supervalent Thought

Lauren Berlant Papers
��Pembroke Center Archives, Brown University {{DEFAULTSORT:Berlant, Lauren 1957 births 2021 deaths American academics of English literature Cornell University alumni Gender studies academics Jewish American writers Jewish philosophers Oberlin College alumni Queer theorists University of Chicago faculty