I will post this here so that later on, when I eventually watch Showboat and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, I will think of Berlant. But I betcha I'll end up searching high and low for this baby:
http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0878/investigations/sentimental_ed.shtml
I finially FINISHED The Female Complaint. Reading it was slow work, but for the past several weeks I enjoyed having it with my breakfast. I've always dismissed the romance genre as dumb and unworthy of serious critique, and yet, when the demands of the day are almost too much to bear, I like to unwind with movies like He's Just Not That Into You. I guess I always thought it would be anti-feminist to be publicly intimate with this intimate public. In a way, chick flicks, especially those that make allusions to or are adaptions of movies that were originally released before the "liberation" of women, make the feminist in me feel dirty, kind of like a porn-watching preacher. And yet, even porn-watching preachers can save souls.
Often, these citations [of sentimental classics] are not so deep: they are gestures toward the tradition of sentimental adaption that explain this time around why the great transformative and fulfilling love, the revolution without the trauma, must remain imaginable whether or not it is possible, discernible only in its smoldering remains.
But what remains is a resource, an unfinished event. Adaptations of sentimental realism are always about splitting and bargaining to stay in the scene of the fantasy of the better good life, as atrophied and confused as the manifest content of that fantasy can be. Possessing the object of desire matters les in these texts than does the re-experience of poteniality - the "tomorrow" in today where one works with what one has in order to survive. The delicate historicity of sentimental work provides pointers to the materials available for transformative opportunity. These scenarios are also archives of tactics for being undefeated, and indeed it is an attachment to this archive that also magnetizes the intimate public. To become not-someting is to unlearn a way of being, to see affective and emotional recalibration not only as possible but as desirable. in other words, in the view of the intimate public, there is no politics without the sentimental aperture/overture because that promise of emotional continuity can sustain people in the social amid the flux of change.
- Lauren Berlant
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