1. Lauren 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.
12 Facts About Lauren Berlant
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Lauren Berlant was born on October 31,1957, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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Lauren Berlant was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.
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Lauren Berlant was a founding member of Feel Tank Chicago in 2002, a play on think tank.
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Lauren Berlant was the author of a national sentimentality trilogy beginning with The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life.
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The project initially began in the 1980s when Lauren 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.
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Lauren 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.
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An emphasis on the "present", which Lauren Berlant describes as structured through "crisis ordinariness", turns to affect and aesthetics as a way of apprehending these crises.
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Lauren Berlant suggests that it becomes possible to recognize that certain "genres" are no longer sustainable in the present and that new emergent aesthetic forms are taking hold that allow us to recognize modes of living not rooted in normative good life fantasies.
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In 2019, Lauren Berlant published The Hundreds with Kathleen Stewart, a collection of brief writing on ordinary encounters, applying affect theory to moments of unexamined daily life.
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Lauren Berlant died of cancer in a Chicago hospice facility on June 28,2021, at age 63.
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Lauren Berlant's papers are held at the Feminist Theory Archive of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University.