Intimate Publics: Reading 2

Lauren Berlant coming into focus

Burgett, Bruce. "The Public Sphere. Present Tense" (Review of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship by Lauren Berlant and Uncivil Rites: American Fiction, Religion, and the Public Sphere by Robert Detweiler). Contemporary Literature, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 136-143 Burgett clarifies what is going on with "intimate publics" a very little bit in this article. I now know that "intimate public" is a transformation of the term "public sphere" that is only imperfectly theorized by Berlant (and much less perfectly by Detweiler). I know that the main value here is perhaps the attention to a wide variety of popular texts. Strangely, though, Burgett does not point to Berlant's "constantly expanding negative terrain" that offers so much power to bourgeois feminists like Irma Bombeck. For me, that seemed the whole point of the 1988 essay.

Clearly, for more information I will need to read Berlant's new book, The Female Complaint: On the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008, Duke)