The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture - Brossura

Berlant, Lauren

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0822342022 ISBN 13: 9780822342021

Casa editrice: Duke University Press, 2008

Riassunto

The Female Complaint is part of Lauren Berlant’s groundbreaking “national sentimentality” project charting the emergence of the U.S. political sphere as an affective space of attachment and identification. In this book, Berlant chronicles the origins and conventions of the first mass-cultural “intimate public” in the United States, a “women’s culture” distinguished by a view that women inevitably have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate and revelatory. As Berlant explains, “women’s” books, films, and television shows enact a fantasy that a woman’s life is not just her own, but an experience understood by other women, no matter how dissimilar they are. The commodified genres of intimacy, such as “chick lit,” circulate among strangers, enabling insider self-help talk to flourish in an intimate public. Sentimentality and complaint are central to this commercial convention of critique; their relation to the political realm is ambivalent, as politics seems both to threaten sentimental values and to provide certain opportunities for their extension.

Pairing literary criticism and historical analysis, Berlant explores the territory of this intimate public sphere through close readings of U.S. women’s literary works and their stage and film adaptations. Her interpretation ofUncle Tom’s Cabin and its literary descendants reaches from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Toni Morrison’sBeloved, touching on Shirley Temple, James Baldwin, and The Bridges of Madison County along the way. Berlant illuminates different permutations of the women’s intimate public through her readings of Edna Ferber’sShow Boat; Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life; Olive Higgins Prouty’s feminist melodramaNow, Voyager; Dorothy Parker’s poetry, prose, and Academy Award–winning screenplay forA Star Is Born; the Fay Weldon novel and Roseanne Barr film The Life and Loves of a She-Devil; and the queer, avant-garde filmShowboat 1988–The Remake. The Female Complaint is a major contribution from a leading Americanist.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Professor of English and Chair of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project at the University of Chicago. She is the author ofThe Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, also published by Duke University Press, andThe Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. She is the editor ofCompassion; Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (with Lisa Duggan); andIntimacy.

Product Description:

Book by Berlant Lauren

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Duke University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0822342022
• ISBN 13: 9780822342021
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 368