Lauren Gail Berlant (October 31, 1957 – June 28, 2021) was an American scholar, cultural theorist, and author who is regarded as "one of the most esteemed and influential literary and cultural critics in the United States." Berlant was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, where they taught from 1984 until 2021. Berlant wrote and taught issues of intimacy and belonging in popular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy of citizenship.
Berlant wrote on public spheres as they affect worlds, where affect and emotion lead the way for belonging ahead of the modes of rational or deliberative thought. These attach strangers to each other and shape the terms of the state-civil society relation.
Early life and education
Berlant was born on October 31, 1957, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They graduated with a BA in English from Oberlin College in 1979, then an MA from Cornell University in 1983, and finally a PhD from Cornell in 1985, after they had already begun teaching at the University of Chicago. (They said student loans obliged them to continue straight through school without a break that would have triggered loan repayment.) Berlant's dissertation was titled, Executing The Love Plot: Hawthorne and The Romance of Power (1985).
Career
Berlant taught at the University of Chicago from 1984 to 2021, becoming the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English. The university awarded them a Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1989), a Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring (2005), and the Norman Maclean Faculty Award (2019).
Berlant's other honors included a Guggenheim Fellowship and, for their book Cruel Optimism, the René Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association and the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award from the Modern Language Association (MLA) for the best book in queer studies in literature or cultural studies. Berlant was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.
Berlant was a founding member of Feel Tank Chicago in 2002, a play on think tank. They worked with many journals, including (as editor) Critical Inquiry. They also edited Duke University Press's Theory Q series along with Lee Edelman, Benjamin Kahan, and Christina Sharpe.
Works
Berlant was the author of a national sentimentality trilogy beginning with The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 1991). Based on their dissertation, the book looks at the formation of national identity as the relations between modes of belonging mediated by the state and law; by aesthetics, especially genre; and by the everyday life of social relations, drawing on Nathaniel Hawthorne's work to illustrate these operations.
The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship—the title essay winning the 1993 Norman Foerster Award for best essay of the year in American literature—introduced the idea of the "intimate public sphere" and looks at the production of politics and publicness since the Reagan era by way of the circulation of the personal, the sexual, and the intimate. In his review, José Muñoz described it as both intersectional, following Kimberlé Crenshaw, and "post-Habermassian", in the vein of work by Nancy Fraser and Berlant's frequent collaborator Michael Warner. Berlant's third book (though second in the trilogy), The Female Complaint: On the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture was published by Duke University Press in 2008. The project initially began in the 1980s when Berlant noticed striking similarities in writing by Erma Bombeck and Fanny Fern, who skewered married life for women in nearly identical ways despite being separated by 150 years. Berlant pursued this mass cultural phenomenon of "women's culture" as an originating site of “intimate publics", threading the everyday institutions of intimacy, mass society, and, more distantly and ambivalently, politics through fantasies rather than ideology. Berlant took up this project by examining especially melodramas and their remade movies in the first part of the twentieth century, such as Show Boat, Imitation of Life, and Uncle Tom's Cabin.