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Affect Theory and the New Age of Anxiety | The New Yorker

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How Lauren Berlant’s cultural criticism predicted the Trumping of politics.

Save this story Save this story In October, 2011, the literary scholar and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant published “ Cruel Optimism ,” a meditation on our attachment to dreams that we know are destined to be dashed. Berlant had taught in the English Department at the University of Chicago since 1984. She had established herself as a skilled interpreter of film and literature, starting out with a series of influential, interlinked books that she called her “national sentimentality trilogy.” A sense of national identity, these books argued, wasn’t so much a set of conscious decisions that we

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