... essay queries these assumptions. Opening with a discussion of how the concept of “the intolerable” features in the work of radical thinkers, the first section examines Lauren Berlant’s project in Cruel Optimism and explores her notion of “the impasse of the present.” The second section then turns to the...

...-Mutashaʾil ( The Strange Circumstances of the Disappearance of Saeed the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist ), 2 written in 1974 by the Palestinian author and politician Emile Habiby, and compare it to Voltaire’s famous Candide: ou l’optimisme ( Candide: or Optimism ), to which it pays a self-proclaimed homage. By...

... optimism central to the post-independence works that imagined the nation as a large family with a powerful patriarch and ideal mixed-race children. The novels' spotlight on sexual violence and its results challenges the symbolic overlap between women's bodies and the land. © 2015 by University of Oregon...

... at which conditions become intolerable and radical action therefore becomes a necessity. According to Schey, this idea condenses a cruelly optimistic dream that theories of impasse share as well as scrutinize. Examining how Lauren Berlant (the theorist of cruel optimism) and Paul de Man (the theorist...

...://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?231648 >. Achebe Chinua . A Man of the People . New York : Anchor , 1967 . Print . ———. Things Fall Apart . Greenwich : Fawcett Crest , 1959 . Print . Berlant Lauren . Cruel Optimism . Durham : Duke UP , 2011 . Print . “Best of Bollywood...

... sustain the colonial enterprise even after independence, in a cruel mockery of the Hegelian fable. Ngũgĩ feared, in this line of thought, that the elites of Africa, in their eagerness to westernize themselves, would succeed at what the British Empire could not, that “in fact if it had been left entirely...

...; Ganim 79-102). Moreover, the characters depend upon such reversals of fortune. Pandarus, with his infectious optimism and fraternal affection, effectively con- soles Troilus by assuring him of the mutability of Fortune, “That, as hire joies moten overgon,/So mote hire sorwes passen everechon” (1.846...

... politics. What use is irony, an ostensibly elitist mode of communication, in a world charac- terized by economic inequality and unequal access to educational resources? Or, more generally, what role can be assigned to humor and levity in a politics that must confront the cruel consequences of these...

... Lines/Border Posts. Ed. Homi Bhabha. Spec. issue of Critical Inquiry 23 .3 ( 1997 ): 431 -59. Butler, Judith. “Critically Queer.” GLQ 1 .1 ( 1993 ): 17 -32. Darwish, Mahmoud. “Unqidhuna min hadha al-hubb al-qasi” [“Save Us from This Cruel Love”]. al-Jadid 6 ( 1969 ): 2 . [Arabic...

... that had been cruel and universal. Chagataev remembered his mother’s words: “Keep going till you come to strangers. Let your father be a man you don’t know.” He had kept going a long way, and now he was on his way back; he had found a father in Stalin, a stranger who had brought him up and broadened...

... Soviet Union (see Miller et al To be sure, revisionist work also reveals the film’s faulty optimism, which is particularly evident in its abruptly formed workers’ alliance. In fact, the CPUSA’s success with blacks largely alienated white workers, who 6 As Joseph Entin has shown, this...

... to “To S.A.” is Frye’s description of the complaint, the poem of exile, neglect, or protest at cruelty, though as we have seen, it is Death, not the cruel Mistress that the persona complains of here. This ambiguity with respect to genre extends also to the poem’s thematic content. The poem’s...

... following: is it possible to represent in fiction an “alien” cultural practice or belief system without violating the inner logic—the self-understanding—of the culture itself? And to what extent is it defensible to represent a cultural practice as simply cruel and misogynistic over and beyond the way...