Books by Lauren Berlant

A literary critical and historical chronicle of womens culture in the United States from 1830 to the present, by a leading Americanist.

Focuses on the need to revitalise public life and political agency in the United States. Delivering a devastating critique of contemporary discourses of American citizenship, this title addresses the triumph of the idea of private life over that of public life borne in the right-wing agenda of the Reagan revolution.

In Sex, or the Unbearable two of our leading theorists of sexuality, politics, and culture engage in intense and animated dialogue about living with-and imagining alternatives to-what's overwhelming in sex, friendship, social inequality, and one's relation to oneself.

The Hundreds-composed of pieces one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long-is Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart's collaborative experimental writing project in which they strive toward sensing and capturing the resonances that operate at the ordinary level of everyday experience.

Examining the complex relationships between the political, popular, sexual, and textual interests of Nathaniel Hawthorne's work, Lauren Berlant argues that Hawthorne mounted a sophisticated challenge to America's collective fantasy of national unity. She shows how Hawthorne's idea of citizenship emerged from an attempt to adjudicate among the official and the popular, the national and the local, the collective and the individual, utopia and history. At the core of Berlant's work is a three-part study of "The Scarlet Letter," analyzing the modes and effects of national identity that characterize the narrator's representation of Puritan culture and his construction of the novel's political present tense. This analysis emerges from an introductory chapter on American citizenship in the 1850s and a following chapter on national fantasy, ranging from Hawthorne's early work "Alice Doane's Appeal" to the Statue of Liberty. In her conclusion, Berlant suggests that Hawthorne views everyday life and local political identities as alternate routes to the revitalization of the political and utopian promises of modern national life.

Ties together political economy and affect in a time of decreased expectations.