{"product_id":"cruel-optimism-9780822351115","title":"Cruel Optimism","description":"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.\"\u003cp\u003eArguing 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. \u003ci\u003eCruel Optimism\u003c\/i\u003e is a remarkable affective history of the present.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eLauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship\u003c\/i\u003e, both also published by Duke University Press, as well as \u003ci\u003eThe Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life\u003c\/i\u003e. She the editor of the books \u003ci\u003eIntimacy\u003c\/i\u003e; \u003ci\u003eCompassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion\u003c\/i\u003e; and (with Lisa Duggan) \u003ci\u003eOur Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and National Interest\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Duke University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50617964691730,"sku":"9780822351115","price":26.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_0641de4c-3c7e-40eb-abe6-695695b50f20.jpg?v=1732526714","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/cruel-optimism-9780822351115","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}