the unfinished business of sentimentality in American culture /
First Statement of Responsibility
Lauren Berlant.
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Place of Publication, Distribution, etc.
Durham :
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
Duke University Press,
Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.
2008.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item
xiv, 353 pages :
Other Physical Details
illustrations ;
Dimensions
24 cm
INTERNAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES/INDEXES NOTE
Text of Note
Includes bibliographical references (pages 319-346) and index.
CONTENTS NOTE
Text of Note
Poor Eliza -- Pax Americana : the case of Show boat -- National brands, national body : Imitation of life -- Uncle Sam needs a wife : citizenship and denegation -- Remembering love, forgetting everything else : Now, voyager -- "It's not the tragedies that kill us, it's the messes" : femininity, formalism, and Dorothy Parker -- The compulsion to repeat femininity : Landscape for a good woman and The life and loves of a she-devil.
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SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
The Female Complaint is part of Lauren Berlant's groundbreaking "national sentimentality" project charting the emergence of the U.S. political sphere as an affective space of attachment and identification. In this book, Berlant chronicles the origins and conventions of the first mass-cultural "intimate public" in the United States, a "women's culture" distinguished by a view that women inevitably have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate and revelatory. As Berlant explains, "women's" books, films, and television shows enact a fantasy that a woman's life is not just her own, but an experience understood by other women, no matter how dissimilar they are. The commodified genres of intimacy, such as "chick lit," circulate among strangers, enabling insider self-help talk to flourish in an intimate public. Sentimentality and complaint are central to this commercial convention of critique; their relation to the political realm is ambivalent, as politics seems both to threaten sentimental values and to provide certain opportunities for their extension.