Alfred Street (University of Auckland Store)
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Cruel Optimism
Paperback Edition: 1
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.
Pages : 352
Publisher : Duke University Press
Publication date : 2011
Subjects: Non-fiction, Published in the USA, Social Sciences, History, Self-help / Personal Development, Sociology, Social & Cultural History, Assertiveness, Motivation & Self-esteem, Popular Culture