Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago "Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin"
Department: English
Date and Time: November 13, 2014 | 3:30 PM-5:30 PMEvent Location: Humanities Gateway 1030
Event Details
The Department of English Presents a Talk by
Lauren Berlant
University of Chicago
"Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin"
Thursday, November 13th, 2014
3:30 PM
Humanities Gateway 1030
With a Reception to Follow in HG 1010
This is a talk about how to read an aesthetics of recessive action. The
concept of a "structure of feeling" offered by Raymond Williams points
to atmospheres shared among strangers but circulating beneath the
surface of explicit life. How do we access that material when the shared
affects are manifested in styles of being that occlude expressivity?
Just as the Great Depression was thought to express and induce the
affective state, are we now, in that sense, in a recession? "Structures
of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin" works with Scott Heim's novel and Gregg
Araki's film to think about how scenes of "underperformed" encounter
shift social norms of trust and aesthetic norms of the event: to do
this, it implicates a history of aesthetic movements from twentieth
century avant-gardes and theories of traumatic dissociation to the
inside knowledges of sexual culture and the DIY aesthetics of punk and
mumblecore.
________________________________________
Lauren Berlant teaches at the University of Chicago, where she is the
George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of
English Language and Literature. Her national sentimentality
trilogy--_The Anatomy of National Fantasy_ (1991), _The Queen of America
Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship_ (1997), and _The
Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American
Culture_ (2008)--morphed into a quartet, with _Cruel Optimism _(2011),
that addresses transnational precarious publics and the aesthetics of
affective adjustment in the contemporary United States and Europe. Her
interest in affect, aesthetics, and politics is also expressed in the
edited volumes _Intimacy_ (2000), _Compassion_ (2004), and _On the Case_
(Critical Inquiry, 2007). Her most recent books are _Desire/Love_ (2012)
and, with Lee Edelman, _Sex, or the Unbearable_ (2014).