Academic literature on the topic 'Melancholic subjectivity'
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Journal articles on the topic "Melancholic subjectivity":
1
Brophy, Sarah. "Angels in Antigua: The Diasporic of Melancholy in Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 117, no. 2 (March 2002): 265–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/003081202x61999.
Abstract:
This essay endeavors to clarify the paradoxes of Jamaica Kincaid's grief in her AIDS memoir, My Brother (1997). By analyzing two related motifs—the memoir's pattern of botanical metaphors and the descriptions of her brother Devon's dying and of his corpse—the essay explores how Kincaid's melancholic commitment to Devon complicates her approach to biographical and autobiographical writing. Weighed down and consumed by her brother's affliction, Kincaid traces how Devon—or, rather, her memory of him—possesses independent powers of articulation, forcing her to confront her own implication, as a relatively privileged expatriate writer, in the political, social, and economic contexts that shape his suffering. A self-theorizing text that testifies to the changing demographics of the AIDS pandemic, My Brother also overlaps with and significantly redirects current theoretical understandings of mourning and melancholia, through its relocation of melancholic subjectivity at the intersection of postcolonial and racial anxieties.
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Korchagin, Kirill. "Serguey Zhadan’s Melancholic Nomadism and National Imagination in Ukraine." Przegląd Wschodnioeuropejski 9, no. 2 (November 30, 2018): 319–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.31648/pw.3220.
Abstract:
A recent state crisis in Ukraine launched the process of the re-treatment of national and state borders not only in public politics and media, but also in culture and literature. According to Deleuze and Guattari, contemporary humans live in the epoch when nomadic subjectivity comes on the scene in order to change the regime of national spatial imagination. Nomadic existence regarding individuals as always “on the road” seems to be a tool for the de- and re-territorialization that shapes new cultural and state borders. This paper regards Serhiy Zhadan, one of the most prominent contemporary Ukrainian poets, and his treatment of the Ukrainian nation and its borders. For Zhadan, the need for poetry practice has to participate in the nation-building process intensified after Maidan. The key concept for this process’s comprehensionis melancholia, which could help to draw an image of contemporary Ukranian subjectivity.
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Arnold-de Simine, Silke. "Beyond trauma? Memories of Joi/y and memory play in Blade Runner 2049." Memory Studies 12, no. 1 (February 2019): 61–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1750698018811989.
Abstract:
Cultural memory studies finds itself at an impasse: whereas ‘cultural memory’ is conceptualized as mediated, dynamic, imaginative and shaped by the present, the dominant paradigm of ‘trauma’ illuminates the hold the past has on us, casting the shadow of a melancholic subjectivity that threatens to obscure our agency as (political) subjects. This article asks what lies in store for memory studies beyond the focus on (classic) trauma (theory). Using the movie Blade Runner 2049 (US 2017; dir: Denis Villeneuve) as an illustrative example, it explores how creative and joyful forms of meaning-making through play and acts of memory inform each other in what the psychoanalyst DW Winnicott described as ‘cultural experience’.
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Jeong, Boram. "The Production of Indebted Subjects: Capitalism and Melancholia." Deleuze Studies 10, no. 3 (August 2016): 336–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/dls.2016.0230.
Abstract:
In the essay ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, Deleuze discusses the differences between nineteenth-century capitalism and contemporary capitalism, characterising the former as the spaces of enclosure and the latter as the open circuits of the bank. In contemporary capitalism, ‘[m]an is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt’ ( Deleuze 1992 : 6). Deleuze claims that under financial capitalism, where the primary use of money is self-generation, economic relations are thought in terms of an asymmetrical power relationship between debtor and creditor, rather than an exchange between commodities. Taking up Deleuze's claim, this paper analyses how time functions in the formation of subjectivity under financial capitalism, by focusing on the temporal structure of debt. The indebted are expected to bind themselves to the past, not only in the moment they make a promise to pay back, but from that moment onwards; in this process, a subject finds himself passively subjected to the temporality determined by the condition of indebtedness, and yet he also actively reproduces and imposes the fact of indebtedness on himself by the feeling of guilt. Guilt, arising from the irreversibility of what has been done and resulting in the inability to proceed into the future, is central both to the indebted and the melancholic. Thus a melancholic subject emerges: a subject conditioned by the dominance of the past and the impossibility of the future.
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Dangaura, Mohan. "Spatial Memory and Ecologically Displaced Subjectivity in Western Tharu Folk Songs of Nepal." Literary Studies 35, no. 01 (March 9, 2022): 57–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/litstud.v35i01.43675.
Abstract:
This paper critically examines the folk dance songs of Dangaura Tharu fromthe perspective of space, memory, and performance. The paper establishes the relationship between Tharu subjectivity and conscience of their past topography inherent intheir folk dance songs. In one aspect where the overall folk performance of Tharu reflects their lifestyle, in another aspect, their folk songs and rituals assist them to connect with the natural environment where they inhabit. This paper has brandied their performance as the art reflecting their bucolic lifestyle and melancholic memory. The songs have been collected, translated, and interpreted from different visual sources and personal communications. To analyze the primary texts, the notion of folklore performance from Alan Dundes, Richard Schechner, and other different folklorists have been utilized as the theoretical and review guidelines. The paper also includes the translated version of the songs. As for the indigenous culture aspirant like me, the study of folklores of Tharu indigeneity helps us to understand the spatial memory of one of the largest ethnicity of Nepal and their socio-economic history. It will provide a new perspective of their historical changes from literature which have not been critically assessed in the already conducted studies. Hence, the findings of the research help us to understand the necessary social index of one of Nepal’s largest indigeneity.
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Hood-Williams, John, and Wendy Cealey Harrison. "Trouble with Gender." Sociological Review 46, no. 1 (February 1998): 73–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-954x.00090.
Abstract:
This paper is a critical engagement with some of the writings of Judith Butler who is perhaps best known for popularising the idea of gender as performative. Here we trace the origins of the notion of performatives in the work of J.L. Austin. We outline Butler's extended definition of performative gender and comment on its relationship to earlier sociological accounts. We follow her development of the idea through the later deployment of Derrida's notion of citationality. We draw attention to potential problems of this usage and to the difficulties of linking it to a psychoanalytic account of subjectivity. We consider her extended example of drag as sharing the impersonatory character of gender and as allegorizing the melancholic character of heterosexual gender identity. We comment on her interest in a theatrical politics that may make trouble for gender. Finally we consider the theoretical burden that these ideas attempt to carry.
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Tan, Ian. "Ian McEwan’s Aesthetic Stakes in Adaptation as Political Rewriting: A Study of Nutshell (2016) and The Cockroach (2019)." Anglia 139, no. 3 (September 1, 2021): 564–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ang-2021-0043.
Abstract:
Abstract This essay will examine two of Ian McEwan’s recent novellas as political rewritings of William Shakespeare and Franz Kafka. McEwan’s Nutshell (2016) repositions the avenger figure in Hamlet as an unborn child whose melancholic awareness of the condition of modern existence allows him a mode of ironic commentary about the possibilities of moral and political choices in a world soon to be destroyed by climate change and nuclear apocalypse. The Cockroach (2019) turns Kafkaesque absurdity into political satire as the protagonist-turned-insect first encountered in The Metamorphosis (1915) is arrogated a position of absolute power in a fictional dystopia eerily resonant of Britain on the verge of Brexit. I argue that McEwan’s re-scripting of these two works of canonical literature imbues his narratives with political resonance, as the formulations and distortions of the physical body in his two novellas map onto the articulations of political belief. In effect, McEwan posits the Foucaultian notion that the body is determined by symbolic systems of power. However, he succeeds in turning the gaze back onto the political by instantiating the radical dimension of a subject whose coming into being is already a political act and event. In other words, McEwan’s artistic intervention in rewriting the narratives of Hamlet and Gregor Samsa explodes the hermeticism of the family drama in the originals by relocating the theatre of subjectivity within the sphere of the political.
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Abdel-Rahman Téllez, Shadia. "The Embodied Subjectivity of a Half-Formed Narrator: Sexual Abuse, Language (Un)formation and Melancholic Girlhood in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing." Estudios Irlandeses, no. 13 (March 15, 2018): 1–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.24162/ei2018-8060.
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Faria, Ângela Beatriz De Carvalho. "A (im)possibilidade de dar corpo ao passado em Não é meia noite quem quer, de António Lobo Antunes." Revista do Centro de Estudos Portugueses 34, no. 52 (December 31, 2014): 103. http://dx.doi.org/10.17851/2359-0076.34.52.103-116.
Abstract:
<p>A partir das reflexões críticas presentes em <em>A imagem sobrevivente: história da arte e do tempo dos fantasmas segundo Aby Warburg</em>, de Georges Didi-Huberman, <em>Origem do drama trágico alemão </em>e <em>O anjo da História</em>, de Walter Benjamin, “Melancolia e saudade”, de Eduardo Lourenço, e <em>As mulheres na ficção de António Lobo Antunes: (in)variantes do feminino</em>, de Ana Paula Arnaut, pretende-se analisar o romance <em>Não é meia noite quem quer </em>(2012), de António Lobo Antunes, privilegiando-se as seguintes questões: a) De que maneira a “melancolia faz do corpo a fonte do desencanto da alma perante o mistério da existência”?; b) Como o espaço-tempo da História, sutilmente aludido na ficção antuniana, torna-se parte integrante de um tempo trágico, inerente à personagem imersa na memória, em busca de ruínas?; c) Como o esquecimento e a (im)possibilidade de dar corpo ao passado são tematizados na narrativa do século XXI?; d) Quais são as estratégias discursivas que sustentam isso?; e) Não haveria um “tempo para os fantasmas”, uma “sobrevivência” e/ou uma “reaparição de imagens” na narrativa que reflete a crise da subjetividade coerente e da representação?; f) Quais são as estratégias da memória numa era de catástrofes, em que se observa o primado das ruínas da casa, da família e dos afetos?; g) De que maneira delineia-se a oscilação comum ao melancólico, situado entre a infelicidade narcísica e o triunfo da alegria?</p><p>From the critical reflexions on <em>A imagem sobrevivente</em>: história da arte e do tempo dos fantasmas segundo Aby Warburg, written by George Didi-Huberman, <em>Origem do drama barroco alemão </em>and <em>O anjo da história</em>, by Walter Benjamin, “Melancolia e saudade”, by Eduardo Lourenço, and <em>As mulheres na ficção de António Lobo Antunes</em>: (in) variantes do feminino, by Ana Paula Arnaut, we intent to analyze the romance <em>Não é meia noite quem quer</em>, written by António Lobo Antunes, focusing on the following issues: a) How the “melancholy makes the body a source of disenchantment of the soul in front of the existence’s mystery”?; b) How History’s space-time, subtly alluded on the antuniana fiction, becomes integrant part of a tragic time, inherent to the character immersed in memory, in seek of ruins?; c) How oblivion and the (im) possibility to embody the past are themed on the XXI century? d) Which are the discursive strategies to support it?; e) Would exist a “time for ghosts”, a “survival” and/or a “reappearance of images” in the narrative that reflects the crisis of coherent subjectivity and of representation?; f) Which are the memory strategies on a catastrophe era, where there are ruins of the house, the family and affections?; g) How to delineate the common oscillation of the melancholic, situated between the narcissistic unhappiness and the triumph of joy?</p>
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CÓRDOVA, CHAD A. "PASCAL AND MELANCHOLY." Modern Intellectual History 16, no. 02 (November 7, 2017): 339–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s147924431700052x.
Abstract:
This article shows how two concepts for which Blaise Pascal'sPensées(1670) are best known—divertissementandennui(often mistranslated as “boredom”)—inherited and transformed medical conceptions of melancholy along with one of melancholy's signature therapeutic protocols: diversion. Instead of limiting the genealogy of Pascal's concepts to more obvious textual sources (St Augustine, Montaigne, etc.), here they are read against the background of an epistemological paradigm dominant in his time: Galenic medicine. Drawing on a large corpus of early modern French medical texts, this article discloses how melancholy, stripped of its overt medical status, remerges in Pascal's analysis of subjectivity, which valorized melancholicennuiagainst the values of a nascent civil society subservient to the monarchic order. Once used to describe outlying temperaments and exceptional pathologies, the discourse on melancholy becomes fundamental to the human being per se in Pascal's theological and anthropological perspective. Thus transformed, the older forms of melancholy and its remedies ensured the possibility of their survival—disguised and unrecognized—in modern theories of subjectivity and psychology. Understanding melancholy's latent presence in thePensées, in other words, sheds new light on the affective aspects of Pascal's social critique and invites us to investigate the modern afterlife of early modern melancholy.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "Melancholic subjectivity":
1
Jeong, Boram. "Theory of subjectification in Gilles Deleuze : a study of the temporality in capitalism." Electronic Thesis or Diss., Paris 8, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017PA080165.
Abstract:
L’argument central de cette thèse est que le capitalisme financier en tant qu’économie fondée sur la dette produit une subjectivité mélancolique, en imposant à son sujet une structure particulière de temps. Je me suis appuyée sur la théorie deleuzienne du temps et sa thèse sur la formation du sujet. La synthèse du temps deleuzienne présente le temps comme constitutif du sujet plutôt que comme une forme subjective du temps, expliquant ainsi comment le sujet peut être passivement produit par le temps. Il procure également une thèse sur la formation du sujet à travers le capital, processus qu’il appelle « subjectivation ». En particulier, cette recherche consiste en trois tâches :(1) le rôle critique de la temporalité dans la formation du sujet, (2) la temporalité spécifique caractéristique du capitalisme financier contemporain, et (3) une pathologie du temps observée chez le sujet du capitalismeThis dissertation looks at time as a socially or psychologically imposed ‘structure’ that determines the ways in which past, present and future are weaved together in the subject. This inquiry presents (1) a critical role of temporality in the formation of the subject, (2) a specific temporality characteristic of contemporary financial capitalism, and (3) the pathologies of time found in the subjects of capitalism. The first two chapters provide an extensive analysis of Deleuze’s passive syntheses of time given in Difference and Repetition, which reveals the subject’s passive relation to time as a structure of ‘becoming.’ The following chapters examine how this ontological structure of time interacts with socio-economic temporalities in its production of the subject. I particularly focus on the temporal structure of debt, which has become a general condition of the subjects in the current economic system. I claim that the debt-based economy produces ‘melancholic subjectivity,’ characterized by a dominance of the past and the inhibition of becoming
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Stamm, Gina M. "The Context of Loss: Contextualization of the Language of Traumatic Memory in Hiroshima Mon Amour and Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1279639764.
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Dumitrescu, Laura-Ioana. "La construction de l'identité dans le Roman de Fauvel." Thesis, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2019. http://www.theses.fr/2019USPCA059.
Abstract:
La construction de l’identité dans Le Roman de Fauvel L’objectif de cette thèse est d’expliquer la manière dont se construit l’identité auctoriale de Gervais de Bus et de Chaillou de Pesstain dans le Roman de Fauvel. Cette construction identitaire est suivie à travers la relation entre mélancolie, « conscience allégorisante » et subjectivité. Les trois éléments sont interrogés dans le contexte de la littérature du XIVe siècle qui privilégie explicitement le régime de l’allégorie, le didactisme et le discours édifiant. Les auteurs du Roman de Fauvel prétendent dire la vérité, dans la mesure où ils se portent témoins de la chute de la cour de Fauvel. Ainsi, la vue est le sens le plus invoqué dans ce long récit qui ressemble du point de vue de la forme au documentaire, bien qu’il soit entièrement une fiction. Mon travail de recherche consiste à examiner la manière dont fonctionne la relation qui s’établit entre une subjectivité mélancolique (donc émotionnelle), le voir dit et un type de construction allégorique à repères fixes. Pour cela, nous faisons référence à une anthropologie des émotions (pour définir la relation entre mélancolie et allégorie) – ceci est l’objet du premier chapitre de cette thèse. Ensuite, à une pragmatique du discours (qui vise à définir les mécanismes du voir dit). Il en est question dans le deuxième chapitre. Enfin, à une analyse iconographique consistant à repérer dans le discours visuel du manuscrit 146 de la Bibliothèque Nationale les marques auctoriales. Si j’ai choisi à consacrer mes recherches à ce roman de la fin du Moyen Âge et non à un autre, c’est pour une raison bien précise : la relation affective directe qui s’établit entre les auteurs et leur personnage principal. Ce rapport est dominé par des émotions intenses : Gervais de Bus et Chaillou de Pesstain détestent Fauvel ; ils veulent sa mort. Nous nous sommes alors demandée si l’énergie que ces deux auteurs dépensent pour vitupérer contre Fauvel ne pouvait constituer également une manière de parler d’eux-mêmes et d’affirmer par conséquent leur propre autorité au cœur même d’un roman qui devient plutôt une expression de leur propre sensibilité que le cadre d’une narrationIdentity construction in Le Roman de FauvelThis dissertation aims at discussing the authors’ identity construction in Le Roman de Fauvel by means of the relations between melancholy, “allegorical consciousness”, and subjectivity. Those three elements are set against the background of 14th century literature, where allegory, didacticism, and the edifying discourse are privileged modes of expression. Gervais de Bus and Chaillou de Pesstain’s major claim is that their testimony on the fall of Fauvel’s court is true, and witnessed with their own eyes. Therefore, the sight is the sense most heavily mobilized in this extensive narration which, formally, resembles a documentary, and yet it is strictly a work of fiction. My research explores the relationship between the melancholic (i.e., emotional) subjectivity, the voir dit, and an allegorical construction with set landmarks.The first chapter relies on the anthropology of emotions in order to define the relationship between allegory and melancholy. The second chapter uses the pragmatics of discourse in order to highlight the functioning of the voir dit. And finally, by means of an iconographic approach, my analysis emphasizes the authors’ marks in the visual discourse of the manuscript 146 at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The reason for choosing this late medieval manuscript as a research topic is the direct affective relationship between the authors and the main character in the novel. This relationship is intensely emotional: Gervais de Bus et Chaillou de Pesstain hate Fauvel and wish him dead. My main hypothesis is therefore that the considerable energy they spend in expressing their feelings might well represent a way of speaking about themselves and asserting their authority in a novel that conveys their own sensibility rather than merely constructing a story
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Coutinho, Márcio José. "A RETOMADA DO ROMANTISMO ALEMÃO EM KEIN ORT. NIRGENDS E DIE NEUEN LEIDEN DES JUNGEN W.: O ROMANCE COMO RESISTÊNCIA." Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, 2007. http://repositorio.ufsm.br/handle/1/9956.
Abstract:
During the seventies, it is possible to verify the arising of a set of works characterized by a tendency on recovering aesthetic elements and values from Romanticism in East-Germany Literature. That country lived under the Socialism imposed by force by the USSR, and the State exerted strong oppression, censorship and repression over people, and also imposed a realistically-based program to be followed by the writers, in order to consolidate the ideological principles of the regime the Socialist Realism, created departing from Georg Lukács conceptions on realism. In response to this context, some literary works can be considered as assuming the role of resistance, by the adoption of non-mimetic forms and techniques of writing. In this sense, this thesis aims at doing a comparative analysis between Christa Wolf s novel Kein Ort. Nirgends and Ulrich Plenzdorf s novel Die neuen Leiden des jungen W., focusing on the possible role of themes as subjectivity, melancholy and turn to past to the political and social aspirations proper of the writers vinculated to this literary tendency. The concept of Romanticism must be understood according to the particular historical meanings resulting with regard to the discussion on cultural and literary heritage. Christa Wolf s, Bertolt Brecht s, Theodor Adorno s, Walter Benjamin s and Anatol Rosenfeld s essays constitute the main critical and theoretical approach used to base this researchDurante a década de 70, verifica-se na literatura da República Democrática Alemã (RDA) o surgimento de um conjunto de obras caracterizadas pela retomada de elementos e valores referentes ao período romântico alemão. O país vive sob o Socialismo imposto à força pela URSS, e o Estado exerce sobre o povo forte opressão, censura e repressão, além de impor um programa de base realista a ser seguido pelos escritores, com o fito de consolidar os princípios ideológicos do regime o Realismo socialista, criado a partir das concepções de realismo de Georg Lukács. Em resposta a esse contexto, pode-se considerar que algumas obras literárias funcionam como resistência, ao adotar formas e técnicas não miméticas de escrita. Neste sentido, a presente dissertação visa a realizar uma análise comparativa entre os romances Kein Ort. Nirgends, de Christa Wolf e Die neuen Leiden des jungen W., de Ulrich Plenzdorf, tendo em vista o possível papel de temas como a subjetividade, a melancolia e o voltar-se para o passado para as aspirações político-socias dos escritores vinculados à referida tendência literária. O conceito de Romantismo deve ser entendido de acordo com os significados históricos particulares resultantes em função da discussão em torno da herança cultural e literária. O principal aporte crítico e teórico empregado como base para essa pesquisa advém dos ensaios de Christa Wolf, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin e Anatol Rosenfeld
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MacDonald, Tanis. "The daughter's consolation : melancholia and subjectivity in Canadian women's paternal elegies." 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1828/809.
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Villarreal, Marlene Sofia Prescott Laurence E. "The short novel and the representation of subjectivity Manhunt by Alejo Carpentier and Memory of my melancholy whores by Gabriel García Márquez /." 2009. http://etda.libraries.psu.edu/theses/approved/WorldWideIndex/ETD-3866/index.html.
Books on the topic "Melancholic subjectivity":
1
Anselm, Sigrun. Vom Ende der Melancholie zur Selbstinszenierung des Subjekts. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1990.
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Szymanski, Adam. Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism. NL Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789463723121.
Abstract:
The hegemonic meaning of depression as a universal mental illness embodied by an individualized subject is propped up by psychiatry’s clinical gaze. Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism turns to the work of contemporary filmmakers who express a shared concern for mental health under global capitalism to explore how else depression can be perceived. In taking their critical visions as intercessors for thought, Adam Szymanski proposes a thoroughly relational understanding of depression attentive to eventful, collective and contingent qualities of subjectivity. What emerges is a melancholy aesthetics attuned to the existential contours and political stakes of health. Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism adventurously builds affinities across the lines of national, linguistic and cultural difference. The films of Angela Schanelec, Kelly Reichardt, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Kanakan Balintagos are grouped together for the first time, constituting a polystylistic common front of artist-physicians who live, work, and create on the belief that life can be more liveable.
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Gill, Denise. Melancholic Modalities. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190495008.001.0001.
Abstract:
Typically dismissed as the remnants of Ottoman nostalgia, the melancholies intentionally cultivated by contemporary Turkish classical musicians are a fundamental aspect of their subjectivity. Melancholic Modalities is the first in-depth historical and ethnographic study of the affective practices socialized by these musicians who champion, teach, and perform a present-day genre substantially rooted in the musics of the Ottoman court and elite Mevlevi Sufi lodges. Denise Gill analyzes how melancholic music making emerges as reparative, pleasurable, spiritually redeeming, and healing. Focusing on the affective, embodied, and sonic practices of musicians who deploy and circulate melancholy in sound, Gill interrogates the constitutive elements of musicians’ melancholic modalities in the context of emergent neoliberalism, secularism, political Islamism, Sufi devotionals, and the politics of psychological health in Turkey today. In a far-reaching contribution to the study of music, affect, and emotion, Gill develops rhizomatic analyses to allow musicians’ multiple interpretations to be heard. Melancholic Modalities uncovers the processes of subjectivity that render a spectrum of feelings (sensations of pain and ecstasy) and emotions (sadness, grief, joy, pleasure) as correct ways of being in the world for Turkish classical musicians. With her innovative concept of “bi-aurality,” Gill’s book forges new possibilities for the historical and ethnographic analyses of musics and ideologies of listening for music scholars.
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Anderson, David. Landscape and Subjectivity in the Work of Patrick Keiller, W.G. Sebald, and Iain Sinclair. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198847199.001.0001.
Abstract:
Situating Keiller, Sebald, and Sinclair as the three leading voices in ‘English psychogeography’, this book examines what, apart from a shared interest in English landscape and townscape, connects their work; it discovers this in the cultivation of a certain ‘affective’ mode or sensibility especially attuned to the cultural anxieties of the twentieth century’s closing decades. As it goes on, the book explores motifs including ‘essayism’, the reconciliation of creativity with ‘market forces’, and the foregrounding of an often agonised or melancholic subjectivity. It wonders whether the work it looks at can, collectively, be seen to constitute a ‘critical theory of contemporary space’. In the process, it suggests that Keiller, Sebald, and Sinclair represent a highly significant moment in English culture’s engagement with landscape, environment, and itself. There are six chapters in all, with two devoted to each subject: one to their early years and less well-known work; and another to their more famous later contributions, including important works such as Patrick Keiller’s London (1994), W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995), and Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory (1997). The book’s analyses are fuelled by archival and topographical research carried out in London and Germany and are responsive to various interdisciplinary contexts, including the tradition of the ‘English Journey’, the set of ideas associated with the ‘spatial turn’, critical theory, the so-called ‘heritage debate’ in Britain, and more recent theorization of the ‘anthropocene’. In all, the book suggests the various ways that a dialectical relationship between dwelling and displacement has been exploited as a means to attempt subjective reorientation within the axiomatically disorientating conditions of contemporary modernity.
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Milbank, Alison. God & the Gothic. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198824466.001.0001.
Abstract:
God and the Gothic undertakes a complete reimagining of the Gothic literary canon to examine its engagement with theological ideas, tracing its origins to the apocalyptic critique of the Reformation female martyrs, and to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, now seen as usurpation of power by the authorities. A double gesture of repudiation and regret is evident in the consequent search for political, aesthetic, and religious mediation, which characterizes the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and Whig Providential discourse. Part I interprets eighteenth-century Gothic novels in terms of this Whig debate about the true heir, culminating in Ann Radcliffe’s melancholic theology which uses distance and loss to enable a new mediation. Part II traces the origins of the doppelgänger in Calvinist anthropology and establishes that its employment by a range of Scottish writers offers a productive mode of subjectivity, necessary in a culture equally concerned with historical continuity. In Part III, Irish Gothic is shown to be seeking ways to mediate between Catholic and Protestant identities through models of sacrifice and ecumenism, while in Part IV, nineteenth-century Gothic is read as increasingly theological, responding to materialism by a project of re-enchantment. Ghost-story writers assert the metaphysical priority of the supernatural to establish the material world. Arthur Machen and other Order of the Golden Dawn members explore the double and other Gothic tropes as modes of mystical ascent, while raising the physical to the spiritual through magical control, and the M. R. James circle restores the sacramental and psychical efficacy of objects.
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Munos, Delphine. After Melancholia: A Reappraisal of Second-Generation Diasporic Subjectivity in the Work of Jhumpa Lahiri. Rodopi B.V. Editions, 2013.
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Munos, Delphine. After Melancholia: A Reappraisal of Second-Generation Diasporic Subjectivity in the Work of Jhumpa Lahiri. BRILL, 2013.
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Assael, Brenda. Epilogue. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198817604.003.0008.
Abstract:
The epilogue begins with consideration of the way the nineteenth-century London restaurant features in individual and collective memory. It insists that such memories were not exclusively characterized by notions of dispossession, melancholy, or regret, and the distance between eating out in the middle of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth century was often expressed through the sentiments of progress and improvement. It then moves on to a reflection on how returning the restaurant to a central role in our understanding of metropolitan history in the Victorian and Edwardian period has important connotations for how the history of Modern Britain, more broadly, might be researched and written. In particular, the restaurant requires more attention to be given to the more materially grounded aspects of the urban experience as much as it does to the more abstracted motifs of representation, performance, and subjectivity.
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Szymanski, Adam. Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism. Amsterdam University Press B.V., 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9789048561681.
Abstract:
The hegemonic meaning of depression as a universal mental illness embodied by an individualized subject is propped up by psychiatry’s clinical gaze. Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism turns to the work of contemporary filmmakers who express a shared concern for mental health under global capitalism to explore how else depression can be perceived. In taking their critical visions as intercessors for thought, Adam Szymanski proposes a thoroughly relational understanding of depression attentive to eventful, collective and contingent qualities of subjectivity. What emerges is a melancholy aesthetics attuned to the existential contours and political stakes of health. Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism adventurously builds affinities across the lines of national, linguistic and cultural difference. The films of Angela Schanelec, Kelly Reichardt, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Kanakan Balintagos are grouped together for the first time, constituting a polystylistic common front of artist-physicians who live, work, and create on the belief that life can be more liveable.
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Wickerson, Erica. The Architecture of Narrative Time. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198793274.001.0001.
Abstract:
Time matters to all of us. It dominates everyday discourse: diaries, schedules, clocks, working hours, opening times, appointments, weekdays and weekends, national holidays, religious festivals, birthdays, and anniversaries. But how do we, as unique individuals, subjectively experience time? The slowness of an hour in a boring talk, the swiftness of a summer holiday, the fleetingness of childhood, the endless wait for pivotal news: these are experiences to which we all can relate and of which we commonly speak. How can a writer not only report such experiences but also conjure them up in words so that readers share the frustration, the excitement, the anticipation, are on tenterhooks with a narrator or character, or in melancholic mourning for a time long since passed which we never experienced ourselves? This book suggests that the evocation of subjective temporal experience occurs in every sentence, on every page, at every plot turn, in any narrative. It offers a new template for understanding narrative time that combines close readings with analysis of the structural overview. It enables new ways of reading Thomas Mann, but also suggests new ways of conceptualizing narrative time in any literary work, not only in Mann’s fiction and not only in texts that foreground the narration of time. The range of Mann’s novels, novellas, and short stories is compared with other nineteenth- and twentieth-century works in German and in English to suggest a comprehensive approach to considering time in narrative.
Book chapters on the topic "Melancholic subjectivity":
1
Flax, Jane. "Politics for Fallen Angels: Subjectivity, Democratic Citizenship, and Undoing Race/Gender Melancholia." In Resonances of Slavery in Race/Gender Relations, 97–128. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9780230117464_6.
2
Hackett, Helen. "‘A book, and solitariness’: Melancholia, Gender and Literary Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Urania." In Renaissance Configurations, 64–85. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1998. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9780230378667_3.
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Gana, Nouri. "Melancholy Islam." In Melancholy Acts, 234–76. Fordham University Press, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9781531503499.003.0007.
Abstract:
The final chapter seeks to understand the psychodynamics of suicidal protest at the crossroads of postcolonialism, Islamism, and psychoanalysis with a particular focus on the work of Tunisian psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama. For George Tarabishi, because Arabs have been stripped of their subjectivity, they were forced to find shelter in tradition; similarly, for Benslama the fantasy of return to origins that marks the Islamist project is spurred by the impasses of subjectivity brought about by the end of the Islamic caliphate. This chapter examines how Benslama makes use of Lacanian vocabulary in order to deconstruct the myth of origin in Islam and the melancholite economy of jouissance that sustains it. There is a tendency in Benslama, however, to reduce what is historical to what is structural or endemic to Muslim societies; the effect is at times more demystifying than illuminating. The chapter engages with Benslama’s alternatives to the Muslim impasses of subjectivity and concludes by taking Benslama’s own construction of a female Muslim itinerary of Islamic history as a salutary example of non-violent melancholic critique that the book has tried to account for throughout the different literary and cultural examples discussed. Women, according to Benslama, are the unacknowledged midwives of monotheistic and Islamic origin par excellence.
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López González, Luis F. "“Mano en Mexilla”: The Lovesick Poet in Libro de buen amor." In The Aesthetics of Melancholia, 138–62. Oxford University PressOxford, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192859228.003.0007.
Abstract:
Abstract This chapter continues engaging with the phenomenon of lovesickness. This part, though, probes the medical discourses of amor hereos that arch over the entirety of Juan Ruiz’ masterpiece Libro de buen amor. Upon a closer look, it becomes evident that Juan Ruiz was steeped in the medical and philosophical traditions of lovesickness that dominated pan-European discourses during his time. It is less obvious, however, that the archpriest fashions his literary persona (and alter ego) as a lovelorn character whose predisposition for lovesickness stems from three main causes: his melancholic complexion, his planetary influence (he alleges he was born under the sign of Venus), and naturalism (he invokes Aristotle to claim that all men are inclined to follow their carnal appetites). Coupled with a comprehensive analysis of the medical discourses that show his clear understanding of lovesickness, this section studies the ways in which melancholia and lovesickness shape the behavior and subjectivity of Don Melón and Doña Endrina in the Ruizian poem.
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"Nichts passiert. Phänomenologie der Melancholie." In Investigating Subjectivity, 235–51. BRILL, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004222595_014.
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Ibrahim, Habiba. "Ghosts." In Black Age, 165–202. NYU Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479810888.003.0005.
Abstract:
This chapter argues that the conspicuously untimely age of ghosts leads the normatively liberal subject to the haunting recognition that the time is out of joint. This chapter unfolds through exemplary pairings of an untimely ghost and the one who is haunted in normative, progressive time. In Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 slave narrative, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the unnamed sister from whom Equiano is separated during the First Passage is a ghostlike alter ego, and referred to in this chapter as the “Equiano Girl.” The Equiano Girl signifies melancholic doubt about the achievement of full maturity in a narrative that ostensibly affirms linear development and liberal individualism. In two ghost stories that bracket the emancipatory promises of liberalism’s expansion in the twentieth century, Charles Chesnutt’s 1898 short story, “The Wife of His Youth,” and Toni Morrison’s final novel, God Help the Child (2015), hauntingly transform the proper black liberal and neoliberal subject into alternative modes of being, expressed as age. To be haunted is to be transformed by and into the untimely alternatives to proper subjectivity. To be haunted is to be awakened to the history that is happening to us now.
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Gana, Nouri. "Melancholy Formations." In Melancholy Acts, 45–88. Fordham University Press, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9781531503499.003.0002.
Abstract:
The aim of this inaugural chapter is to demonstrate the extent to which political and military defeats have spawned a psychoaffective disposition toward melancholy, and become the recurring site of creative and critical inquiry, exacerbated even further by a predominant sense of unstoppable technoeconomic belatedness and existential precarity. The chapter embarks on a series of analyses of an eclectic number of plays, novels, poems, films, and cites short critical statements and dictums and at times even aphorisms that best dramatize the cultural, political, and discursive gamut of the collective disposition toward melancholy. In the meanwhile, what becomes clear is that Arab subjectivity is unthinkable outside the collusion/collision between local authoritarianism and Euro-American imperialism. The melancholy turn of Arab subjectivity accompanies its commitment to the transformative project of liberation. From Nouri Bouzid and Chokri Mabkhout to Ghassan Kanafani and Annemarie Jacir through Youssef Chahine and Sonallah Ibrahim, the liberation of the individual emerges as one of the most urgent conditions of national liberation. In the end, the chapter fleshes out the notion of “melancholy acts” through sustained reflections on the question of iltizām or commitment in the aftermath of the ongoing Nakba and Naksa.
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Klein, Michael L. "Lutoslawski's String Quartet: Mourning, Melancholia, and Modern Subjectivity." In Lutosławskis Worlds, 71–86. Boydell and Brewer Limited, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/9781787442214.004.
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"Melancholy, Passions and Identity in the Renaissance." In Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture, 85–104. Routledge, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315599625-11.
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Pressley, Arthur. "Nella Larsen’s Quicksand : Mourning through Biracial Identities." In Life Under the Baobab Tree, 29–56. Fordham University Press, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9781531502980.003.0002.
Abstract:
This chapter examines Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand and her use of the trope of mulatto. It is a critical feature of the biomythography used to suggest new possibilities for Black subjectivity and demonstrates how Creoleness, colorism, and Pan-Africanism are crucial in the healing of colonial oppression and creating complex identities. In Larsen’s protagonist, Helga Craine, she foreshadows and extends the racial dynamics analyzed by Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Larsen reveals that mulattos do not merely live between Black and White worlds, but expresses the racial melancholia later examined by theorists such as Paul Gilroy and Anne Cheng. This racial melancholia, a dread of self and others, a fear of both loss and gain, a denial of life, death, and resurrection, continues to direct intra-racial and inter-racial dynamics that never entirely becomes (post)colonial. The subjectivity of the mulatto always challenges and destabilizes traditional Africana tropes of home, mother/daughter, middle passage, and racial identity in a manner that makes each of these more of an ethical, rather than psychological, social, or political commitment. I argue that the multiple events and places of the novel represent the Creoleness of all racial, ethnic, and gender identities.
Conference papers on the topic "Melancholic subjectivity":
1
Meškova, Sandra. "THE SENSE OF EXILE IN CONTEMPORARY EAST CENTRAL EUROPEAN WOMEN’S LIFE WRITING: DUBRAVKA UGREŠIČ AND MARGITA GŪTMANE." In NORDSCI International Conference. SAIMA Consult Ltd, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.32008/nordsci2020/b1/v3/22.
Abstract:
Exile is one of the central motifs of the 20th century European culture and literature; it is closely related to the historical events throughout this century and especially those related to World War II. In the culture of East Central Europe, the phenomenon of exile has been greatly determined by the context of socialism and post-socialist transformations that caused several waves of emigration from this part of Europe to the West or other parts of the world. It is interesting to compare cultures of East Central Europe, the historical situations of which both during World War II and after the collapse of socialism were different, e.g. Latvian and ex-Yugoslavian ones. In Latvia, exile is basically related to the emigration of a great part of the population in the 1940s and the issue of their possible return to the renewed Republic of Latvia in the early 1990s, whereas the countries of the former Yugoslavia experienced a new wave of emigration as a result of the Balkan War in the 1990s. Exile has been regarded by a great number of the 20th century philosophers, theorists, and scholars of diverse branches of studies. An important aspect of this complex phenomenon has been studied by psychoanalytical theorists. According to the French poststructuralist feminist theorist Julia Kristeva, the state of exile as a socio-cultural phenomenon reflects the inner schisms of subjectivity, particularly those of a feminine subject. Hence, exile/stranger/foreigner is an essential model of the contemporary subject and exile turns from a particular geographical and political phenomenon into a major symbol of modern European culture. The present article regards the sense of exile as a part of the narrator’s subjective world experience in the works by the Yugoslav writer Dubravka Ugrešič (“The Museum of Unconditional Surrender”, in Croatian and English, 1996) and Latvian émigré author Margita Gūtmane (“Letters to Mother”, in Latvian, 1998). Both authors relate the sense of exile to identity problems, personal and culture memory as well as loss. The article focuses on the issues of loss and memory as essential elements of the narrative of exile revealed by the metaphors of photograph and museum. Notwithstanding the differences of their historical situations, exile as the subjective experience reveals similar features in both authors’ works. However, different artistic means are used in both authors’ texts to depict it. Hence, Dubravka Ugrešič uses irony, whereas Margita Gūtmane provides a melancholic narrative of confession; both authors use photographs to depict various aspects of memory dynamic, but Gūtmane primarily deals with private memory, while Ugrešič regards also issues of cultural memory. The sense of exile in both authors’ works appears to mark specific aspects of feminine subjectivity.