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Optimism. --- Personality --- Philosophy --- Cheerfulness

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A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life-with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy-despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives "add up to something." Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory-with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary-is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present.

Popular culture --- Optimism --- Progress. --- Philosophical anthropology --- Culture populaire --- Optimisme --- Progrès --- Conditions sociales --- Progress --- Social conditions --- Progrès

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Longtime admirers of Mark Twain are aware of how integral animals were to his work as a writer, from his first stories through his final years, including many pieces that were left unpublished at his death. This beautiful volume, illustrated with 30 new images by master engraver Barry Moser, gathers writings from the full span of Mark Twain's career and elucidates his special attachment to and regard for animals. What may surprise even longtime readers and fans is that Twain was an early and ardent animal welfare advocate, the most prominent American of his day to take up that cause. Edited and selected by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who has also supplied an introduction and afterword, Mark Twain's Book of Animals includes stories that are familiar along with those that are appearing in print for the first time.

Animal behavior --- American wit and humor. --- Animal rights. --- Animal liberation --- Animals' rights --- Rights of animals --- Animal welfare --- American literature --- Animals --- Animals, Habits and behavior of --- Behavior, Animal --- Ethology --- Animal psychology --- Zoology --- Ethologists --- Psychology, Comparative --- Moral and ethical aspects --- Behavior --- 19th century american literature. --- adventures. --- american literature. --- animal kingdom. --- animal welfare advocate. --- animals. --- entertaining. --- father of american literature. --- great gift. --- huck kills a bird. --- human inadequacies. --- humanity. --- humorist. --- integral animals. --- jim smiley and his jumping frog. --- jumping frogs undiscovered rediscovered and celebrated writings of mark twain. --- morality lessons. --- optimism. --- pilgrims on horseback. --- unique voice. --- united states of america.