News and Events
Events
Annual Kane Lecture: 'After the good life, an impasse: Notes on the Cinema of Precarity'
by Lauren Berlant
Lauren-Berlant
Lauren Berlant says she that her talk--"After the good life, an impasse: Notes on the Cinema of Precarity"--will be about "what the aesthetic slowing down of contemporary historical experience can open up to us methodologically." "This paper is about the fraying of a fantasy, a fantasy of 'the good life,'" she goes on to explain: "Its cases are two films of Laurent Cantet [
Ressources humaines/Human Resources (1999) and
L'Emploi du Temps/Time Out (2001)] : its broader project is to engage the new affective languages of the contemporary economic atmosphere-languages of anxiety, contingency, and precarity-that take up the space where sacrifice, upward mobility, and meritocracy used to be. What happens to optimism when futurity splinters as a prop for getting through life? What happens when an older ambivalence about security (the Weberian prison of disenchanted labor) meets a newer detachment from it (everything is contingent)? How to understand the emergence of this as an objective and
felt crisis?"
Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Professor in the English Department at the University of Chicago. She is the author of
The Anatomy of National Fantasy (1991),
The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997), and
The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008). Berlant is a unique and influential voice in American studies, feminist theory, and queer theory.
Time: Friday, October 30 @ 1:30 pm
Location: Denney 311
