..., 1997) and, as editor, Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (Routledge, 2004). She is currently finishing The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture , editing a book on the case study, and working toward getting to Cruel Optimism...

...Gila Ashtor Taking Lauran Berlant’s “cruel optimism” as exemplary of recent attempts to integrate psychoanalysis and ideology critique, this essay focuses on the psychological paradigm underlying such an evocative phrase in order to demonstrate that even the most capacious interpretations...

... technology and education by invoking Lauren Berlant’s term cruel optimism and challenges assertions that technical savvy yields more jobs for undergraduates and that moocs reduce the cost of higher education. Chun insists that if the humanities are at risk, it is because they have capitulated...

... narrative consciousness and time. The author reads various aspects of this disturbance, and particularly how the lobster’s “nervous [. . .] life” as encrypted in two small terms of the story—“cruel pot” and “neuter creature”—emerges as an early inscription of a trapped or unvoicable “I” foretelling...

... whether or not it is seen to be continuing, is one of the most d fferences 95 compelling problems in Kafka's writing. But just as compelling, just as cruel, is the tenacity of signification, the fact that signs continue whether or not they are understood to be continuing. If death is cruel because...

... gonzález 3 The Politics of Translation in Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo lauren berlant 20 Cruel Optimism rachel bowlby...

... best embodies those two impulses, simultaneously, is the dandy: he exercises the most cruel, centralizing aesthetic constraints over the most vaporous, immoral imagination. A continuous self-invention, the dandy is both ruthlessly rigorous and infinitely ephemeral, the subjective correlative...

...Rey Chow; James A. Steintrager james a. steintrager is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman (Indiana University Press, 2004) and the forthcoming The First Sexual...

...; they argue that it is because the death penalty is cruel, inasmuch as it uses “cruel and unusual punishment,” that it should be abolished. Derrida’s point, however, is that such arguments do not contest the principle of the death penalty but merely the modality through which it is carried out. Cruelty...

.... They critiqued the embrace of a techno-utopianism that, as Chun pointed out, keeps us trapped in what Laurent Berlant calls “cruel optimism” as we continually justify our existence in terms that are not our own. Cruel optimism allows us...

... puts it, “folded into life” (10). These conditions might include cruel optimism, “Panoptimism” ( Berlant and Edelman 3 ), or self-aggressing or other-aggressing moralism. Huffer does not disagree with Berlant and Edelman’s analysis that ego-defensive forms of optimism aiming at preservation attack what...

....” It is a national paradox whose tangled intractability, yet quicksilver plasticity, bedevils all the cases in Franke’s wonderful and intriguing book. As Franke describes so eloquently in Wedlocked , cruel retribution was rained down on the left-behind wives and children of freed black soldiers who left...

... of this inhuman creature (and Beauty is clearly depicted here not merely as a goddess, or as a purified aesthetic ideal, but also as a sexually sadistic, demonically cruel and unfeeling feminine entity), the apostrophe, “O mortals,” is murderous. Beauty’s call to “mortals” recalls that to be mortal...

... it as psychic servitude, describing at length “the slav- ery to which the ego submits when complying with the extremely cruel demands and admonitions of its loved object which has become installed within the ego.” She continues: “[T]hese...

... how the dynamics of power, proximity, and precarity establish each of us as different kinds of vulnerable subjects. Too many of us have our own memories of #MeToo moments, small injustices and cruel violations; flashbacks poised to trigger a visceral response upon witnessing the testimony of another...

... on this transvaluation of good and bad into good and evil, and the derivation of the good of those who suffer from the evil of those who make them suffer: "the wretched alone are the good the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful...

... fulfills this political objective, however, by presenting Prince both as the abused victim of cruel masters and as a socioethical being who is active in obtaining her freedom. Her actions converge so as to reaffirm the political mission of the antislavery campaign. As the retrospective reconstruction...

.... World Health Organization. Report of the Consultation on International Travel and HIV Injection. Geneva: n.p., 1987. Veitch, Andrew. "The Cruel March of AIDS." Guardian [Manchester] 16 Feb. 1988: 32. Watney, Simon. Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987...

... but on organizing it differently. The epistemological sadism of “affectless mastery,” based on the cruel safety of detachment, is displaced and dislocated by Resnais’s exercises of building worlds that enable and enforce the decentering of the viewer, who is drawn into the filmmaker’s carefully constructed...

..., which it submerges into poverty, pain, and discord. Lauren Berlant, for example, takes this disjuncture as the focal point of her analysis in Cruel Optimism, in which she argues that the cultural promise of happiness for all...