000			01996nam a22002297a 4500
005			20251229125134.0
008			251229b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9780822351115
028			_a: International Book Distributors _b: Flat no. 17, Prakash Apartment, Ansari Road, New Delhi _c: 122274 _d: 6/12/2025
082			_a302.22 BER
100			_aBerlant, Lauren Gail.
245			_aCruel optimism _c/Lauren Gail Berlant.
260			_aLondon _b: Duke University Press _c, 2012.
300			_a343p. _c: 24cm.
365			_b1676
520			_aA relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life—with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy—despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives “add up to something.” Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory—with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary—is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present.
650			_aCruel optimism
650			_aOoptimism
650			_aSociology
700			_aLauren Berlant.
942			_cBOOK
999			_c66877 _d66877