Lynch Lecture Fall 2020 | The Unfinished Business of Cruel Optimism: Crisis, Affect, Sentimentality

"I have not had the emotional, or even intellectual, capacity to write about Lauren Berlant since her death. I feel the grief-sharp but also ineffable-but no words emerge in coherent narrative form. Memories float by, mental images, sentence fragments. In 1993, she told me I didn’t have a robust enough understanding of homosociality, in 1996 we stood over her stove roasting red peppers together, sometime in the early 2000s we had a heated discussion about South Park. in 2020, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, she texted me with a single word (“sob”). Like that. But mostly it is just the indescribable (for me) feeling of loss. How do you write about someone who was your teacher, mentor, and dear friend for over two decades? The interpersonal joys and struggles, the sense of accomplishment and failure (oh the feeling of failure!), the laughter and the arguments. Others have done so beautifully, and I am grateful for that.
Today is the one-year anniversary of the Lynch Lecture that Lauren gave at the Bonham Centre entitled, “The Unfinished Business of Cruel Optimism: Crisis, Affect, Sentimentality.” We knew at the time that it was very likely to be her last public talk in which she could share her new work on The Inconvenience of Other People. And so we talked a lot about what form she wanted that to take. As was usual for her, she wanted it to happen in dialogue with other people, to connect and show up and build with friends, and so we asked Dana Luciano and Rebecca Wanzo to be part of the conversation. What emerged was a moving exchange about feeling, fantasy, the historical present, being in relation, and so much more."
Dana Seitler, Director of the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
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Lauren Berlant was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She was the author of The Anatomy of National Fantasy (University of Chicago Press 1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Duke UP 1997), The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Duke 2008), Cruel Optimism (Duke UP, 2011), Sex, or the Unbearable with Lee Edelman (Duke UP, 2014), The Hundreds with Kathleen Stewart (Duke UP, 2017), and Desire/Love (Punctum, 2012).
Rebecca Wanzo is Professor and Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University, St. Louis. She is the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (SUNY Press 2009) and The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (NYU Press, 2020).
Dana Luciano is Associate Professor in the departments of English and Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (NYU, 2007), the edited volumes “Queer Inhumanisms," a special issue of GLQ: The Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, co-edited with Mel Y. Chen (vol. 22 no. 2-3, spring/summer 2015) and Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (NYU Press, 2014), co-edited with Ivy G. Wilson. Luciano is currently at work on the book project How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century US.