Reading Lauren Berlant Writing

Lauren Berlant's work offers a model for approaching the intertwined tasks of theorizing and writing: delightfully excessive at the level of sentence construction, deliberately flattening and de-dramatizing at the level of critique. This has the effect of calling a body into new modes of attention: to hums, to incoherence and ambivalence, to history's coming-into- and falling-away-from forms and genres. In Berlant, everything circulates, sticks, resonates, gathers, and dissipates—rhythms and registers and intuitions rise to the surface, find cross-patternings and interferences, exert palpable tensions and reliefs, come to cluster, and sometimes precipitate as events or episodes with distinct histories pointing toward new futures.