![]() ![]() According to Berlant, these suspicions manifested themselves in mundane ways: hoarding things or overeating might be attempts to overcome feelings of personal powerlessness. Berlant tuned in to a wider sense of disaffection-the feeling among average voters that neither of these visions for change was really about them, or for them. Those who opposed him continued to work themselves into a radical frenzy, as the Republican mainstream reoriented itself around the Tea Party. The book was published at a moment when Barack Obama could still credibly draw upon “the audacity of hope,” and, with a second term in sight, people wondered if he would finally unleash the progressive will that many believed lingered deep inside him. ![]() “Cruel Optimism” was dense and academic, but it proved enormously influential. These feelings, Berlant says, are the “body’s response to the world, something you’re always catching up to.” But our Sisyphean pursuit of the good life has higher stakes, and its amalgam of fantasy and futility is something that we process as experience before we rationalize it in thought. ![]() Perhaps your emotional state is calibrated around a sports team, like the New York Knicks, and despite hopes that next season will be better you vaguely understand that you’ll be let down anyway. The persistence of the American Dream, Berlant suggests, amounts to a cruel optimism, a condition “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your own flourishing.” We are accustomed to longing for things that we know are bad for us, like cigarettes or cake. For all that, we keep on hoping, and that persuades us to keep on living. But often what we feel instead is a sense of precariousness-a gut-level suspicion that hard work, thrift, and following the rules won’t give us control over the story, much less guarantee a happy ending. In “Cruel Optimism,” Berlant moved from theorizing about genres of fiction to theorizing about “genres for life.” We like to imagine that our life follows some kind of trajectory, like the plot of a novel, and that by recognizing its arc we might, in turn, become its author. She had established herself as a skilled interpreter of film and literature, starting out with a series of influential, interlinked books that she called her “national sentimentality trilogy.” A sense of national identity, these books argued, wasn’t so much a set of conscious decisions that we make as it was a set of compulsions-attachments and identifications-that we feel. Berlant had taught in the English Department at the University of Chicago since 1984. In October, 2011, the literary scholar and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant published “ Cruel Optimism,” a meditation on our attachment to dreams that we know are destined to be dashed. ![]()
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