Search Results

Tools

The female complaint : the unfinished business of sentimentality in American culture

Author
Berlant, Lauren Gail, 1957-2021
Title
The female complaint : the unfinished business of sentimentality in American culture / Lauren Berlant.
Format
Book
Published
Durham : Duke University Press, 2008.
Description
xiv, 353 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
URL
<Table of contents only> http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip083/2007043974.html
Notes
Includes bibliographical references (p. [319]-346) and index.
Contents
  • 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.
Summary
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.
Kinsey subjects
Mass media. Emotions. Emotions and sex differences. Popular culture studies. Women psychology. Women in cinema. Women in literature. Status of women.
ISBN
9780822342021 (pbk. : alk. paper) 9780822341840 (cloth : alk. paper) 0822341840 (cloth : alk. paper) 0822342022 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Holdings

Library
Blmgtn - Kinsey Institute Library (by appointment only)
Call Number
160.42 B47 f4 2008
Location
Auxiliary Library Facility - Kinsey Institute