Journal articles on the topic 'Productive melancholia'

This article takes the position that our contemporary overheated media environment lends itself to comfortable passivity, resulting in mental breakdown in the guise of the dark emotions: anxiety, melancholia and boredom. This is especially the case with the inevitable synergy of the upcoming technological transformations from genetic modification, virtual reality simulacra and artificial intelligence/robotics. After discussing the data from the World Health Organization regarding the stark increase of people across the globe suffering from depression and anxiety, this article weds the concepts of McLuhan’s hot–cool distinction with Fromm’s delineation of the productive character orientation. Following Fromm, this article argues that joy ensues from reason, productive labour and love–sorrow from ignorance, alienated work and indifference. When we wilfully abrogate our responsibilities to self and other via non-participational mediated forms, we cede away our potential for growth and development. This leads to the emotional breakdowns of guilt, boredom, anxiety and melancholia. Viktor Frankl’s logotherapeutic perspective is discussed as a counterbalance to the social effects wrought by our overheated technological environment. Frankl’s stress on phenomenological meaning as the cornerstone of existence provides a lens to understanding the affects of an over-reliance on technological gadgetry.

This essay applies the concept of postimperial melancholia, taken from the work of Paul Gilroy, to describe the affective undercurrents of medieval text editing in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first through an example from Beowulf. The discussion is focalized through the emendations to line 1382a, where an ambiguous series of minims leads to different editorial choices in Klaeber's first three editions of the poem, in his second supplement to the third edition, in the fourth edition produced by R. D. Fulk, Robert D. Bjork, and John D. Niles, and in Kevin Kiernan's Electronic Beowulf. The emendation proposed by Klaeber in his second supplement is imbricated in the shameful history of Old English studies and the project of constructing legendary origins for whiteness. Kiernan and the fourth edition editors each reject Klaeber's reading without addressing this history, focusing attention instead on technological and methodological interventions that produce other readings which are then represented alongside Klaeber's. The result is representative of how the closed and nonrecuperative temporality of melancholia is manifest in the principal development of postwar medieval text editing more generally, which is the abandonment of the notion that scholarly interventions constitute progress toward a better representation of a text, in favor of imagining them as expansions of a spatialized critical field around nodes of dissent. The essay concludes that the best way forward for the field is to recognize its melancholia and its causes, so that it might contribute to more productive futures.

A Melancholic Croquis is based on the motifs of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and its eponymous film adaptation by Luchino Visconti. The director Matej Filipčič conceived the project as a unique synthesis of a theatre performance, a scientific experiment and a social event. The article focuses on this triple connection, the specifics of the project’s content, form and production. It first explains the thematic deviation from the original: the performance does not foreground the artist and his being torn between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, but centres on melancholy, which Filipčič recognises as melancholic and defines experientially as an equation of both principles. The original motifs are present but are of secondary significance since the question no longer concerns a philosophical deliberation on the ways of achieving beauty but rather the staging of an ambience, experience itself and the possibility of recording the spectator’s emotional responses. Why? Because a melancholic is a person par excellence clinging to time and enclosed by time, able to ‘fight’ against the fleeting and the fleetingness of time with only one weapon: a series of questions that force creative persons (artists, philosophers, scientists) towards creative acts, into which Filipčič constantly inserts memories, intertwining the personal and the collective, placing the particular in the universal that is valid here and now. The article also traces the fundamental building blocks of Filipčič’s staging process: the poetics of memory, the use of a croquis and a concern for communicativeness, which are read through A Melancholic Croquis.

How do scientists and experts in marginal scientific fields think about themselves, their knowledge production, and their practices in relation to dominant sciences? In this article, drawing on fieldwork with a group of Lacanian psychoanalysts, I argue that what motivates much of the training, practice, and thought of some contemporary psychoanalysts is their place as practicing a minor science in relation to dominant forms of psychiatry and neuroscience in the United States. They are exemplary marginalized experts who articulate themselves and their work against mainstream forms of neuroscientific and psychiatric expertise. I adopt the concept of minor sciences from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who characterize them by their eminently political nature, their challenging of dominant sciences through intensive uses of language, and their disenfranchisement. Yet Deleuze and Guattari are relatively silent on the experiential qualities of practicing minor sciences. I turn to Sigmund Freud’s distinction of mourning and melancholia in relationship to lost objects, suggesting that one of the constituent components of minor sciences is a persistent state of melancholy related to the minor sciences’ struggling for relevance. Drawing on my fieldwork with a Lacanian community and their interest in who and what belongs to psychoanalytic thought, what threats endanger the status of psychoanalysis, and what is at stake in keeping psychoanalysis alive in the United States, I suggest that the power of melancholia proves vital to keeping minor sciences alive for marginalized experts.

In this article, Justin Grinage investigates how black youth experience and contest racial trauma using racial melancholia, a psychoanalytic conception of grief, as a framework for understanding the nonpathologized endurance of black resistance to racism. Examining data from a yearlong ethnographic study, Grinage engages the notion that melancholia is needed for mourning to take place, a crucial distinction that engenders agency in relation to the constant (re)production of racial oppression in the lives of five black twelfth-grade students at a multiracial suburban US high school. Grinage illustrates how racial melancholia structures racial trauma and analyzes its effects on black identity, dismissing pathologizing definitions of racial injury while centralizing the importance of asset-based, healing-centered approaches for enacting racial justice in education.

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.

This manuscript, per the author, will explain “Environmental Melancholia” and “Collective Social Mania,” and describe how they are connected in a hedonic loop of capitalism and buyer's remorse. This manuscript will also explain the role of symbolism and symbolic acts in healing one's grief, and the connection it has to art. The materials used in the artwork, Relentless Memorial, reference the unyielding pollution and mass production of goods created by the petroleum industry, as well as creating a dichotomy between a clean, white, virgin plastic to an ever-increasingly polluted, contaminated world. The formal presentation of Relentless Memorial as an installation is intended to provide a place of contemplation and mourning. Furthermore, the presentation of the installation as a panorama is related to the phenomenon of panoramas of the nineteenth century, and the onset of environmental pollution during the industrial revolution of that time. It invites a layered investigation into how that industry has influenced the environmental melancholia felt by society today.

This essay discusses the politics of affect in post-1967 Arabic literary and cultural production. It argues that melancholia’s underappreciated swerve from normative structures of power and mourning is a threshold moment of critical and cultural enablement in the Arab world, where the nexus between proxy and settler colonialisms continues to produce and reproduce almost all aspects of literature and culture.

In its attention to the undead state of American slavery, Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017) appears to fulfill Stephen Best’s diagnosis of a “melancholy historicism” in recent Black cultural production. But instead, the film draws viewers into a virtual experience—and potential analysis—of the roles of both technological and environmental media (from TV, film, and cellphones to housing, ceramics, and cotton) in perpetuating, or disrupting, Black captive kinship to a state of originary loss.

Chinese films in “the Chinese century” are more expansively confident than ever. A new vogue for science fiction, a genre that has taken off in China alongside the country's stratospheric growth, suggests that China is ready to take up the baton of galactic discovery adventure. Chris Berry examines the father-son narratives in The Wandering Earth (Frant Gwo, 2019) and Nova (Cao Fei, 2019), two recent films that link Chinese patriarchy to the triumph and trials of modern science and progress. The Wandering Earth reaffirms those dominant models in action adventure mode, while Nova's melancholic wanderings are ambivalent and even mournful. Nova reveals a more complex and varied Chinese imagination regarding the challenges presented by the twenty-first century than a mainstream production like The Wandering Earth.

AbstractIn 2002, film director Lars von Trier agreed to stage Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle in Bayreuth. The project was abandoned, however, after two years of preparation. For this article’s research, I conducted interviews with key persons involved with the project, not least Lars von Trier himself, and I was given access to unseen materials (documents, videotapes and other items) from the archives of Lars von Trier’s film company, Zentropa, which shed light both on the director’s plans for the production and on the process that would eventually spell the end of the project. The materials, however, turned out to illuminate not only what the opera world lost, but also what von Trier’s later films gained from his immersion into Wagner’s creative world. In this article I seek to map both the ill-fated process and explore the later benefits from it in the films Antichrist (2009), Nymphomaniac (2013) and, above all, Melancholia (2011), with its echoes of Wagner’s apocalyptic Götterdämmerung.

This writing is about a study of the psychology of the colour Gray used on the painting backgrounds. The study concerns how the colour Gray affects the behaviour of artists and has an impact on the production of works of art. A descriptive research using qualitative research method through surveys and observations as instrument. The artist uses the colour Gray as his guide in producing works to give a sense of emotional strength, feelings of melancholy, passion and so on. Each colour has a different psychological and emotional effect.

The word “distance” itself is ambiguous: it means both the gap between two things, and the very ability of a thing to be at some distance from another, to stand at a distance. In the first case, we are simply talking about the impossibility of things to interact in the usual mode, while in the second about the thing’s own position, its individuation, which does not allow confusions. The superposition of these two meanings is productive for thought: from Plato’s reasoning about the causes of civil disorder through Nietzsche’s melancholic concept of elitism to 20th century theories proceeding from “social distance” (R. Park) as one of the starting points for constructing social reality. Although the translation of this word into different languages is not a problem, since the visual metaphor suggested by the geometry course (segment of a line) is clear, in all cases it is necessary to take into account rather explosive potential of its semantics.

Digital convergence and Web 2.0 have led to the emergence of new forms of involvement and participation of consumers in the game industry. Prosumers are now participating in productive and decision-making structures at the highest level using collective financing model or crowdfunding. In this system, the traditional business relations based on hierarchy have undergone a major change repositioning the creative focus on the player. The top-down culture of game business becomes bottom-up participatory culture intervening mainly in game genres, topics, and mechanics. This research frames crowdfunding in the participatory culture and the conversion from consumer to prosumer-investor to later analyze the 10 most funded games on Kickstarter. A qualitative analysis focused on the ideology of crowdfunding discourses concludes that positive arguments for video games collective financing model develop an emancipatory-utopian framework, which is critical with publishers, libertarian with users, and melancholic-postmodern with the content developed in the past.

An examination, annotation and translation of the hitherto unpublished correspondence with Baer in the Baron papers lead to a re-contextualization. Intensified after his demise in 1980, a large stream of publications attempted to contextualize the work of the historian of the Jews of Christian Spain, Fritz Yshaq Baer, against the background of broadly known events of the twentieth century, identifying him with a “School” of Jewish history. Here this notion is traced to the early 1970s and alternative possibilities are explored. First, attention is paid to the role of institutions, networks and models in the production of knowledge without restricting this solely to the universities or to Germany. This leads to valuing the role of Spanish institutions and their intellectual presuppositions and practices. The history of reading raises questions as to the role of intended public, history of the book and genre in his publications. Finally, taking the ethics of reading into consideration, we ask who the participants in the dialogues he was constructing were. This includes his correspondence with Baron which is published as an appendix.

The Art that emerged in the early years of the Portuguese 20th century, similarly to what occurred in Europe, was invested with expectations and strong beliefs. Nonetheless works and ideas were only accessible to few that were near to the new approaches and paradigms. The unspeakable and the unexpected came up from the intellectual and sensitive verve of bold poets or artists, experimenting daring structures and actions. That was the case of Fernando Pessoa literary production, enriched by his heteronymous’ magnum opus. Let’s take a walk into slow unquietness, in order to recognize singular aesthetic goals shared by writers and philosophers that might be [intrinsically] connected with the Portuguese Poet, hereby presented through this semi-heteronymous Bernardo Soares. The conceptual scenery demands upon strong reminiscences projecting melancholic, nostalgic feelings and undoubtedly expectations at a time. Walking does not imply travelling or great displacements, it doesn’t imply any journey at all, shaped such as a Bernardo Soares’ A Voyage I never made understood as a Never Accomplished Travel.

<p>This essay suggests that literary production post-postmodernism has not progressed to something new, but rather has returned to quintessentially modernist anxieties and modes of expression––especially renewed faith in grand narratives. The argument draws upon and coalesces two theoretical texts to help identify what I term ‘revenant modernism’ as a “symbolic space” (Flatley, 2008: 32) where a sort of “secular re-enchantment” (Landy &amp; Saler, 2009: 2) remains possible: Jonathan Flatley’s <em>Affective mapping: Melancholia and the politics of modernism</em> (2008) and <em>The re-enchantment of the world: Secular magic in a rational age</em> (2009) by Joshua Landy and Michael Saler. I then examine two recent novels––Will Self’s <em>Umbrella</em> (2012) and Eimear McBride’s <em>A girl is a half-formed thing</em> (2014)––as evidence of this return. Along the way, I tie both of these novels back to their stated modernist influence (James Joyce’s <em>Ulysses</em> [1993]) in order to show how Self and McBride’s fiction borrows from Joyce’s particular brand of postcolonial modernism.</p>

In this article, the authors find it productive to explore the relationship between Russian and foreign literature through the prism of the philosophy of existentialism, which is quite popular today. Research methodology: philological analysis of literary texts (problematic approach), comparative analysis with elements of comparative studies. The authors come to the conclusion that Murakami immerses his heroes in situations where it is possible to change everything, but such a situation requires unambiguous decisions and immediate action, but the heroes, for the most part, are endlessly lonely, melancholic people who become themselves an obstacle to making any decisions. They are merciless to themselves, stubborn to the point of absurdity and always torture themselves from within. Each hero has his own deep "Norwegian forest" in his mind, but not everyone finds the strength and resilience to get out of it into a real and noisy Japanese metropolis, continue his life without getting lost in the labyrinth of his own consciousness, and find the main meaning of his existence. Thus, the existential motives of F.M. Dostoevsky are acquiring a new sound in the prose of the Japanese author, who, despite his western orientation, did not succeed in avoiding the imposition of the national mentality proper on his artistic world-modeling.

This article argues that psychoanalytic notions of affect – including ideas of anxiety and melancholia, as well as deconstructive concepts of auto-affection – offer a feminist ethico-politics and a notion of affect as interface. Beyond the confines of the experiential and the positivist, both psychoanalysis and deconstruction provide insights into affect as a technology that understands the subject as porous. I consider works by Derek Jarman and Shirin Neshat to demonstrate the importance of the ethico-politics of affect as interface in contemporary cultural production. Both artists, in the process of considering the spectacular nature of notions of feminist and queer, use images of interface as a way of delimiting the spectacular nature of being and demonstrating the singularity of the event, the desire to fix through framing, and the parergonal nature of framing. The presence of the subject is questioned even as an auto-affection is suggestive of a spectral demand of the ethico-political. In the case of Jarman’s Blue, the denial of image as face in favour of the screen as interface is interrupted by sound and voice, which gesture toward representation as impossible but necessary. In the case of Neshat, the persistence of the photographic – the highly aesthetic self-portrait as mugshot – foregrounds face as interface, as one that questions presence through the insistence of a representational apparatus.

The theme of the paper is observing and revealing non-pragmatic language that, when dealing with deliberately chosen texts about acts of violence, leads to productive aesthetic disturbance. In its substance, this language refers to the gulf between intensity of representation and ideological intention towards a reader declared in a complicated manner. The paper discusses five texts with the theme of the Holocaust. Three of them deal with the Holocaust as with a recent experience, namely Curzio Malaparte’s Caput (1944), Žofia Nalkowska’s Medallions (1945), and Leopold Lahola’s Last Thing (1949–1956, published in a book in 1968); whereas two other ones deal with the Holocaust after some time in a form of belles-lettres memoirs or testimony, namely Juraj Špitzer’s I Did Not Want to Be a Jew (1994) and Jerzy Kosiński’s Painted Bird (in English in 1965, Czech translation was published in 2011). All interpreted texts are marked by specific language situated beyond the border of traditional literary representation. This language is either extremely subjective, expressive and periphrastic – in this case it borders on with absurd Realism or nonsense (in case of C. Malaparte, J. Kosiński, and L. Lahola) – or, in its neutral representation (in case of Ž. Nalkowska, and J. Špitzer), it borders on with a melancholic self-referential document on limits of cultural humanism or of normal, common humanity.

Malthusian population theory was developed as a result of the rapid population growth rate and diminishing return in agricultural sector. Malthus observed geometric ratio growth in population vis-a-vis arithmetic ratio growth in food production and envisaged world “misery” or “vice” if not checked. Subsequent development in the world however, proved the theory wrong. But this work discovers that the predicted doom of population theory is manifesting in Nigeria - rapid population growth rate, food crises, large scale poverty, ethnic and religious conflict, HIV/AIDS epidemics, etc. Although, the aforementioned are in line with the theory’s predictions, Nigerian government operational modus favors these manifestations over the years. The work therefore, recommended that the judicial arm of government be made more efficient at law-enforcement, education sector be given appropriate budgetary attention to subdue poverty, diseases and health care predicaments. Thus, conclude that although, the theory is looked upon as primitive and wrong, the forecasted melancholies still exist in the 21st century Nigeria. Keywords: Population, Political Economy, Economic Growth

Across discourses and genres, stories of climate change often follow a race-against-time plot, as if confronting environmental disaster meant accepting the terms of the disaster film genre. The objective of this article is to elucidate some of the anxieties these terms manage, in particular, anxiety provoked, paradoxically, by the stability of the earth even in the worst-case scenarios—even, for example, in the case of the total uninhabitability of the earth for human beings. Within the framework of the race-against-time plot, the earth cannot appear as simultaneously stable and uninhabitable; uninhabitability can appear only as a breakdown of stability. Through readings of Sylvia Wynter, Jules Michelet, Jules Verne, and Lars von Trier, who takes the disaster film genre to its limit in Melancholia, this article elaborates an alternative to this splitting, starting from the seafloor, whose primal uninhabitability for human beings is unaffected by the wells that now puncture it and the cables that now cross it. Of course, there is a difference between the disastrous uninhabitability caused by capitalist production and the uninhabitability that precedes it primordially, but the latter is part and parcel of the stability that holds even in the worst-case scenarios. That this limit cannot be destroyed does not mean that there is any limit to how far the desire to destroy it can go. Rather, it helps account for the inextinguishability of the destructive desire, the acknowledgment of which, a condition for change, cannot happen within the terms of the race-against-time plot.

Abstract Following the recent death of Andrzej Wajda, a reconsideration of his work is timely, and all the more so because he provides a reference point for many East Central European cinéastes. Thus this article uses his work as a main switching point between meditations on the issues his films raise. It theorises the status accorded History in them, and in Marxism in general, in relation to Walter Benjamin’s work on allegory and ruin, as well as to questions of characterisation. Also considered is the degree and nature of existentialism’s influence on this cinema, with blockages of choice foregrounded as necessarily entailing a thematics of doubling, contradiction and masking, and a reworking of the meaning of accusations of ‘treachery’ that have been a leitmotif of oppressed cultures, particularly when – as in cinema – access to the means of production depends on real or apparent collaboration with state authorities. The particular meaning of certain delays in production will also be considered, as will certain figures from the Polish culture (this writer’s primary specialisation) with an obvious ‘Baltic connection’, i.e. a Lithuanian origin, such as Tadeusz Konwicki and Czesław Miłosz. The thematics of doubling will finally be related to notions of ruination and of a filmic language adequate to it, which it will be argued may be seen prototypically in ‘the Zone’, Chris Marker’s name for a particular method of image-presentation, named in homage to that great Soviet film shot in Estonia, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (Сталкер, Russia, 1979). To revert to the title of Wajda’s final film Afterimage (Powidoki, Poland, 2016), and invoke Miłosz also, the Zone may be called the native realm, not only melancholic but also surprisingly utopian, of the after-image that is the ruin.

In his inaugural lecture to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Béla Bartók proposed dividing the works of Liszt into two unequally valued portions: the valuable works that showed Liszt as an artistic innovator, and the undesirable ones that adopted a false “Hungarian” style that pleased unsophisticated listeners but corrupted their taste. In sum, he asserted a radical pseudo-aesthetic dichotomy in the interests of a political agenda. Only a dozen years later, Bartók’s own legacy was dichotomized in a very similar way by musicians and politicians, on both sides of the Cold War divide, who were acting according to a political agenda that no one even tried to disguise as aesthetic. The crypto-political pseudo-aesthetics of the twentieth century, whether practiced in the name of pure national traditions, in the name of social justice, or in the name of aesthetic autonomy, has corrupted both the production and the reception of art music and has played a part in its devaluation, all too evident in twenty-first-century society. The many errors of evaluation enumerated in this essay have contributed to that melancholy history.

Through the revisit of a previous study, conducted in 1980, the present research inquiries, in 2010, the relationship between economic and social circumstances, territorial rootedness, and temporal experience among the workers of a Portuguese industrial community. Interlocking ethnographic observation, biographic interviews, and extensive survey, the research explores the inflection, occurred between 1980 and 2010, in the interpretation of historical change spread among those workers, especially the transformation of their retrospective vision of the past dictatorial regime of Estado Novo (1933–1974). The research brings, therefore, a contribution to the study of the schemata of temporal perception and interpretation used in a particular community, pointing especially to the verbal and emotional expressions that constitute there the remembrance of the past. Nostalgia or melancholy emerges, thus, as expressions introduced by the changes on the local systems of expectations and opportunities of the community and, simultaneously, as personal and collective tactics used to cope with the present situation through the rehabilitation of the memory. At the same time, this article shows the pregnancy in revaluating or reproducing preceding researches, in the original or similar sites of inquiry, with a reflexive posture regarding the situated production of knowledge.

Laying aside manure meat, milk and egg is considered as key performance indicator of livestock farm profitability of Bangladesh till yet whereas manure contains minimum 45-55% feed nutrient fed to animals. A survey based research work was conveyed to find out the major channel of using this valuable livestock manure by farmers from twelve selected district of Bangladesh. Results showed that most of the cattle and buffalo farmers prefer solid storage system to manage their manure. From this stored manure, about 35% was used for land fertilization, 47% for burning fuel preparation, 8% for composting and remaining 10% become completely wasted. A very few of cattle manure (4.65) was utilized by the care of anaerobic digestion. But this improved system was completely absent in case of buffalo and small ruminants manure management. Dung produced from small ruminants fully goes for solid piling. About 20% of poultry manure managed in improved way and the remaining portion was mostly utilized in a very disparage way. In anaerobic digestion system, the produced gas went for home consumption and bio-slurry creates havoc for both farmer and environment. Land fertilization and aquaculture coves its utilization but the amount is too low compared to its production. Above 52% of total bio-slurry become wasted due to limited knowledge and lack of appropriate handling techniques. The scenario of urine and liquid slurry management was very melancholic. About 0.37 and 0.203 kg methane emission per head per year was calculated from solid storage system of cattle and small ruminant animal manure. The value is also high in burning fuel preparation (5.46 kg) and liquid slurry (5.81 kg) and a bit low in anaerobic digestion system (1.24 kg) per head per year. Asian J. Med. Biol. Res. March 2019, 5(1): 63-70

El presente artículo pretende proporcionar un contexto hermenéutico adecuado a la interpretación que Harold Bloom hizo de Don Quijote en un capítulo sobre Cervantes de The Western Canon (1994). La generalizada recepción negativa que este libro ha tenido en ámbito hispano, en gran medida debido a la denunciada (des)atención del crítico norteamericano hacia las literaturas hispanas, ha provocado una paralela (des)atención de la crítica hispana hacia un ensayo que, sin suponer una contribución decisiva al cervantismo filológico, constituye un valioso juicio implícito sobre el sentido de lo literario. De acuerdo con este juicio, la gran literatura o es violenta inscripción de autoridad o es melancólico duelo ante la defección de la violencia autorial, duelo que con frecuencia adopta la forma de venganza crítica en forma de arbitraje. El presente artículo pretende, pues, situar el ensayo sobre Cervantes en el contexto amplio de toda la producción crítica de Bloom. Dicha contextualización arroja luz tanto sobre la continuidad desconstructiva de la mirada crítica de Bloom como sobre la naturaleza irrenunciablemente anómala del texto cervantino. This article aims to provide an appropriate hermeneutic context to Harold Bloom's interpretation of Cervantes' ​​Don Quixote in a chapter of The Western Canon (1994). The widespread negative reception this book has had in the Hispanic scope, largely due to the reported (un)attention of the American critic to Hispanic literature, has led to a parallel (dis)attention of Hispanic criticism to an essay that, without being a decisive contribution to philological cervantism, provides a useful implicit judgment about the meaning of literature. According to this view, great literature is either violent inscription of authority, or melancholic clash at the defection of authorial violence, a duel that takes often the form of critical vengeance as arbitration. This article therefore aims to situate the essay on Cervantes in the broader context of all critical production by Bloom. Such contextualization sheds light on both deconstructive continuity of Bloom's critical gaze and the undeniably anomalous nature of Cervantes' text.

Resumo: Uma nação de navegadores transformada em país de emigrantes. A partir desse diagnóstico, Eduardo Lourenço, no ensaio “A nau de Ícaro ou o fim da emigração”, escrito em 1993, compreende a identidade nacional portuguesa como “um colossal fenômeno de expatriação”. Em observação a dois filmes ficcionais paradigmáticos da tematização do colonialismo pelo cinema português anterior à redemocratização, Chaimite (1953) de Jorge Brum do Canto e Mudar de Vida (1966) de Paulo Rocha, o referido diagnóstico torna-se especialmente sugestivo, uma vez que a imagem gloriosa do herói português desbravador e civilizador de outros povos, apresentada pelo primeiro filme, acaba transformada, pelo segundo, na figura melancólica do trabalhador que, sem perspectiva de adequação aos novos sistemas produtivos, percebe a emigração como única alternativa. É a partir dessa relação que aqui se pretende discutir essas duas obras cinematográficas em atenção ao contexto histórico em que foram produzidas.Palavras-chave: cinema português; salazarismo; colonialismo; guerra colonial.Abstract: A nation of navigators turned into a country of emigrants. From this diagnosis, Eduardo Lourenço, in the essay “A nau de Ícaro ou o fim da emigração”, written in 1993, understands Portuguese national identity as “a colossal phenomenon of expatriation”. Observing two paradigmatic fictional movies of the thematization of colonialism by Portuguese cinema before re-democratization, Chaimite (1953) by Jorge Brum do Canto and Mudar de Vida (1966) by Paulo Rocha, this diagnosis becomes especially suggestive, since the glorious image of the pioneering Portuguese hero as the civilizer of the other peoples, on the first film, becomes, in the second, the melancholy figure of the worker who, with no prospect of adapting to the new production systems, perceives emigration as the only alternative. It is from this relationship that we intend to discuss these two cinematographic works in attention to the historical context in which the two movies were produced.Keywords: Portuguese cinema; salazarism; colonialism; colonial war.

The paper is based on the hypothesis that the motive of madness is very common in literary works starting from the literature of the old age to modern and postmodern literary production. Many famous world writers have worked on this motive in various literary epochs, genera and species. In antique comedy, man's insanity was portrayed in a witty, playful and humorous way, and the same poetic, approach to the treatment of this motive is also of later comedical works. In tragedy, madness is often the cause of starvation, but also the ability to get to know essential knowledge, truth and ideas. Sometimes madness is considered obsessive, sick, or just punishment. In Renaissance literature, this state of the human spirit is seen through the theory of human wonders, attributing melancholy to educated young men, and hysteria to young women. It was caused by disappointment, suffering, unrequited love or sin. In the focus of our research were found some of the world's renowned literary creators, moral psychologists, who along with each psychological portrait also offer ethical values that characterize character. The theme of this paper is the motive of madness in some literary works. This paper is an attempt to address the complex issues of insanity in world literature through literary research supported by psychology. The aim of the paper is to examine the presence of the motif of madness, its understanding and interpretation from the ancient Greek drama, through the literature of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Classicism, Romanticism, Realism, to modern and postmodern literary traditions. The image of madness is given through various manifestations of character behavior, that it is authentic or irradiated, and through the comments of other heroes, eyewitnesses and interpreters.

Abstract In May 2021 Jewish Voice for Labour (“JVL”) published a combative document entitled How the EHRC Got It So Wrong-Antisemitism and the Labour Party. The document criti­cises the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s October 2020 Report of its investiga­tion into antisemitism in the Labour Party. The Commission found the Labour Party responsible for antisemitic conduct giving rise to several unlawful acts in breach of the Equality Act 2010. In addition to its legal findings, it also made critical factual findings, identifying a culture of acceptance of antisemitism in the Labour Party, which suffered from serious failings in leadership, where the failure to tackle antisemitism more effectively was probably a matter of choice. The essence of JVL’s attack on the Commission’s Report is as follows. First, it is said that the Commission did not and could not lawfully investigate antisemitism as such; to the extent that it purported to do so, its findings of unlawfulness are purportedly meaningless. Secondly, JVL claims that the Commission made no finding of institutional antisemitism. Thirdly, by failing to require production of evidence referred to in a certain leaked report, probably prepared by Labour Party officials loyal to Jeremy Corbyn, the Commission is accused of nullifying at a stroke the value of its own Report as a factual account. Fourthly, JVL claims the Commission’s Report is not just legally unten­able, but purportedly a threat to democracy. Finally, JVL claims the Commission’s analysis was not just wrong, but that it exercised its statutory powers in bad faith. This article offers a response to each of the five pillars of JVL’s attack, all of which collapse under scrutiny. As to the first pillar, the article identifies the disappearing of antisemitism as the linchpin of JVL’s argument and shows how JVL’s criticism is underpinned by a political epistemology of antisemitism denialism. As to the second pillar, it shows that the absence of the term “institutional antisemitism” in the Commission’s Report is a semantic quibble. In sub­stance, the Commission found that the conduct under investigation amounted to institu­tional antisemitism. As to the third, the article demonstrates that JVL’s complaint about the Commission’s failure to call for production of the leaked report is perverse because that report constitutes an admission of the correctness of the complaints put before it. More­over, the Corbyn-led Labour Party itself decided that it did not want the Commission to consider that material. As to the fourth pillar, the article shows that far from being a threat to democracy, the Commission’s Report grasps the nettle of antisemitism denial. It con­cludes that continuing to assume and assert that Jews raising concerns about antisemitism are lying for nefarious ends may itself be, and in at least two cases was, a form of unlawful anti-Jewish harassment. As to the fifth, the article rebuts the extraordinary charge that the Commission exercised its powers in bad faith. Rather strikingly, neither JVL nor Jeremy Corbyn was willing to take the Commission on judicial review. The article concludes by considering how the poverty of JVL’s reasoning, coupled with the extravagance of its accu­sations, invites a symptomatic reading of Antisemitism and the Labour Party as a disap­pointing illustration of left-wing melancholia.

In her discussion of Melanholični snovi grofa Save Vladislavića (The Melancholy Dreams of Count Sava Vladislavić), an opera by Serbian composer Svetislav Božić, the author begins by discussing the composer's operatic allusion to anamorphosis, an architecture and painting technique, in both of its application modes (the perspectival and the catoptric). The trans-media and temporal conversion of this visual tool into the aspect of staged drama is notable in the theatrical procedure of reflective doublings of roles/ characters and production of visual syntactic parallelisms, which deepen semantic relations between otherwise unrelated personages and events from various but important layers of Serbian cultural and intellectual history (Nemanjić, Nikola Tesla, Count Sava Vladislavić). The logic of unclose similarity and borderline contact relates anamorphosis to a special way of ordering the imagery of dreams, whereby the symbolic interiority of a hidden image, the mysterious pattern of sense, may be penetrated only by finding the correct viewing angle. In its longing for the obscure, anamorphosic focalization counts on the ex-centred spectator's capacity to approximate the remote and relate the unrelated. In that sense, shaping the Count's great dreaming by means of a polyphony of oneiric subjects and states and a heteroglossia of remote contexts and other people's stories and lyrical contemplations suggests Sumatraism as a chronotope, as the idea that there is universal connectedness and harmony in the world. The idea of Sumatraist connections informs both the understanding of the opera libretto's inter-textuality (along the lines of the quotation-collage form of the cento, the literary genre) and the arc of association that the composer draws in harmonic-motivic terms as well, in order to produce a special nexus of music-dramatic narration and presentation. In that Sumatraist inter-textual nexus, other people's stories and lyrical contemplations, qua manifestations of a collective consciousness, are deepened by means of a collectively unconscious (archetypal) perspective of a mythical, allegorical, and phantasmagorical dance-pantomime procession, as yet another oneiric form, whose typical Dionysian sequence, intoxicatio-phalophoria-sparagmos, affirms not only the theatrical model of anamorphosic doubling and Sumatraist connections, but also a unique theme in this operatic narrative - transcending sacrifice, tribulation, and death in a foreign land by means of the regenerative power of collective (historical and cultural) memory.

The article develops the problem of Ivan Turgenev’s perception of Walter Scott’s non-historical novel SaintRonan’s Well (1824) with the focus on the comparative study of Turgenev’s ClaraMilich (1883), whose composition reflects Walter Scott’s motifs and images. Forty years after reading Saint Ronan’s Well in the original, Turgenev turns to it within the framework of his own plan. In Clara Milich, the English novel and its author are brought into focus of deep artistic reflection. Turgenev’s Clara Milich genetically ascends to Walter Scott’s Clara Mowbray, which proves that Turgenev creatively interacted with the English novel. The dialogue between the two authors is mediated by William Shakespeare. Following the logic of the English novel, steadily leading to a dramatic denouement, Turgenev creates a brief story of a woman’s loving soul, yearning for sincere understanding and responsiveness, yet doomed to death. Taking Walter Scott’s novel as a model, Turgenev draws a parallel between Clara Minich’s life and the tragedy of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, putting the main mail character in the position of Hamlet. Twice compared to Shakespeare’s heroine, Scott’s Clara Mowbray repeats Ophelia’s suffering path in its pivotal points: collapse of happiness in love - loss of a lover -madness due to the experienced shock - death resulting from melancholy and madness. Turgenev gives no direct textual references to Ophelia, but transfers the essential elements of this image to his Clara Milich, which manifests not only in the motif of madness, but also in the general design of the tragic love story. A theatrical production in Saint Ronan is based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream - the story of Athenian lovers parallels the collision of Tyrrel and Clara. Tugenev’s epic also includes a play with similar overtones: a small performance about a tragedy of love is arranged in the house of the Georgian princess. Like Walter Scott, Turgenev uses the metaphor “all the world’s a stage” to create a narrative subtext that enhances and deepens the human drama. Following Scott, Turgenev accepts Shakespeare’s concept of the tragic state of the world and, in order to unfold the tragedy of the human, introduces a fantastic element into the story in a similar vein. For Turgenev’s Aratov, the intrusion of the unreal leads to admitting his guilt and, at the same time, reveals a hitherto unknown feeling. However, like Shakespeare and unlike Scott, Turgenev uses the otherworldly image not only as a sign of disaster, but also as the hero’s hope for an imaginary salvation. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

From November 2017 to April 2018, in Mexico City’s MuseoUniversitario Arte Contemporaneo, the Russian artistic-activist collectivechto delat (what should be done?) exhibited a number of monuments inmemory of the Russian revolution. In centring on three monuments, in thisarticle I consider the ability of the collective’s monuments to inspire politicalmediations on historical potential embedded in revolutionary pasts. I arguethat melancholia does not inevitably mark historical fixity or unaccomplishedmourning, but rather a temporal openness to mnemonic productivity andsolidarity. It is in this sense that melancholia does not index a pathologicalresponse to loss, but a political alternative to normative mourning. Inrecuperating melancholia as a potentially productive and critical relation to thepast, chto delat reframes accusations of left-wing melancholia as being “stuckin the past” as an opening to consider alternatives to what is now.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Marcus Clarke famously described the Australian outback as displaying a “Weird Melancholy” (qtd. in Gelder 116). The strange sights, sounds, and experiences of Australia’s rural locations made them ripe for the development of the European genre of the Gothic in a new location, a mutation which has continued over the past two centuries. But what does it mean for Australia’s Gothic landscapes to be associated with the affective qualities of the melancholy? And more particularly, how and why does this Gothic effect (and affect) appear in the most accessible Gothic media of the twenty-first century, the television series? Two recent Australian television adaptations, Wake in Fright (2017, dir. Kriv Stenders) and Mystery Road (2018, dir. Rachel Perkins) provoke us to ask the question: how does their pictorial representation of the Australian outback and its inhabitants overtly express rage and its close ties to melancholia, shame and violence? More particularly, I argue that in both series this rage is turned inwards rather than outwards; rage is turned into melancholy and thus to self-destruction – which constructs an allegory for the malaise of our contemporary nation. However, here the two series differ. While Wake in Fright posits this as a never-ending narrative, in a true Freudian model of melancholics who fail to resolve or attend to their trauma, Mystery Road is more positive in its positioning, allowing the themes of apology and recognition to appear, both necessary for reparation and forward movement.Steven Bruhm has argued that a psychoanalytic model of trauma has become the “best [way to] understand the contemporary Gothic and why we crave it” (268), because the repressions and repetitions of trauma offer a means of playing out the anxieties of our contemporary nation, its fraught histories, its conceptualisations of identity, and its fears for the future. Indeed, as Bruhm states, it is precisely because of the way in which “the Gothic continually confronts us with real, historical traumas that we in the west have created” that they “also continue to control how we think about ourselves as a nation” (271). Jerrold E. Hogle agrees, noting that “Gothic fiction has always begun with trauma” (72). But it is not only that Gothic narratives are best understood as traumatic narratives; rather, Hogle posits that the Gothic is uniquely situated as a genre for dealing with the trauma of our personal and national histories because it enables us to approach the contradictions and conflicts of traumatic experience:I find that the best of the post-9/11 uses of Gothic in fiction achieve that purpose for attentive readers by using the conflicted un-naturalness basic to the Gothic itself to help us concurrently grasp and conceal how profoundly conflicted we are about the most immediate and pervasive cultural “woundings” of our western world as it has come to be. (75)Hogle’s point is critical for its attention to the different ways trauma can be dealt with in texts and by readers, returning in part to Sigmund Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia: where mourning is the ‘healthy’ process of working through or narrativising trauma. However, melancholia coalesces into a denial or repression of the traumatic event, and thus, as Freud suggests, its unresolved status reappears during nightmares and flashbacks, for example (Rall 171). Hogle’s praise for the Gothic, however, lies in its ability to move away from that binary, to “concurrently grasp and conceal” trauma: in other words, to respond simultaneously with mourning and with melancholy.Hogle adds to this classic perspective of melancholia through careful attention to the way in which rage inflects these affective responses. Under a psychoanalytic model, rage can be seen “as an infantile response to separation and loss” (Kahane 127). The emotional free-rein of rage, Claire Kahane points out, “disempowers us as subjects, making us subject to its regressive vicissitudes” (127; original emphasis). In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler explicates this in more detail, making clear that this disempowerment, this inability to clearly express oneself, is what leads to melancholia. Melancholia, then, can be seen as a loss or repression of the identifiable cause of the original rage: this overwhelming emotion has masked its original target. “Insofar as grief remains unspeakable”, Butler posits, “the rage over the loss can redouble by virtue of remaining unavowed. And if that very rage over loss is publicly proscribed, the melancholic effects of such a proscription can achieve suicidal proportions” (212). The only way to “survive” rage in this mutated form of melancholia is to create what Butler terms “collective institutions for grieving”; these enablethe reassembling of community, the reworking of kinship, the reweaving of sustaining relations. And insofar as they involve the publicisation and dramatisation of death, they call to be read as life-affirming rejoinders to the dire psychic consequences of a grieving process culturally thwarted and proscribed. (212-13)Butler’s reading thus aligns with Hogle’s, suggesting that it is in our careful attendance to the horrific experience of grief (however difficult) that we could navigate towards something like resolution – not a simplified narrative of working through, to be sure, but a more ethical recognition of the trauma which diverts it from its repressive impossibilities. To further the argument, it is only by transforming melancholic rage into outrage, to respond with an affect that puts shame to work, that rage will become politically effective. So, outrage is “a socialised and mediated form of rage … directed toward identifiable and bounded others in the external world” (Kahane 127-28). Melancholia and shame might then be seen to be directly opposed to one another: the former a failure of rage, the latter its socially productive incarnation.The Australian Gothic and its repetition of a “Weird Melancholy” exhibit this affective model. Ken Gelder has emphasised the historical coincidences: since Australia was colonised around the same time as the emergence of the Gothic as a genre (115), it has always been infused with what he terms a “colonial melancholia” (119). In contemporary Gothic narratives, this is presented through the repetition of the trauma of loss and injustice, so that the colonial “history of brutal violence and exploitation” (121) is played out, over and over again, desperate for resolution. Indeed, Gelder goes so far as to claim that this is the primary fuel for the Gothic as it manifests in Australian literature and film, arguing that since it is “built upon its dispossession and killings of Aboriginal people and its foundational systems of punishment and incarceration, the colonial scene … continues to shadow Australian cultural production and helps to keep the Australian Gothic very much alive” (121).That these two recent television series depict the ways in which rage and outrage appear in a primal ‘colonial scene’ which fixes the Australian Gothic within a political narrative. Both Wake in Fright and Mystery Road are television adaptations of earlier works. Wake in Fright is adapted from Kenneth Cook’s novel of the same name (1961), and its film adaptation (1971, dir. Ted Kotcheff). Mystery Road is a continuation of the film narrative of the same name (2013, dir. Ivan Sen), and its sequel, Goldstone (2016, dir. Ivan Sen). Both narratives illustrate the shift – where the films were first viewed by a high-culture audience attracted to arthouse cinema and modernist fiction – to the re-makes that are viewed in the domestic space of the television screen and/or other devices. Likewise, the television productions were not seen as single episodes, but also linked to each network’s online on-demand streaming viewers, significantly broadening the audience for both works. In this respect, these series both domesticate and democratise the Gothic. The televised series become situated publicly, recalling the broad scale popularity of the Gothic genre, what Helen Wheatley terms “the most domestic of genres on the most domestic of media” (25). In fact, Deborah Cartmell argues that “adaptation is, indeed, the art form of democracy … a ‘freeing’ of a text from the confined territory of its author and of its readers” (8; emphasis added). Likewise, André Bazin echoes this notion that the adaptation is a kind of “digest” of the original work, “a literature that has been made more accessible through cinematic adaptation” (26; emphasis added). In this way, adaptations serve to ‘democratise’ their concerns, focussing these narratives and their themes as more publically accessible, and thus provoking the potential for a broader cultural discussion. Wake in FrightWake in Fright describes the depraved long weekend of schoolteacher John Grant, who is stuck in the rural town of Bundinyabba (“The Yabba”) after he loses all of his money in an ill-advised game of “Two Up.” Modernising the concerns of the original film, in this adaptation John is further endangered by a debt to local loan sharks, and troubled by his frequent flashbacks to his lost lover. The narrative does display drug- and alcohol-induced rage in its infamous pig-shooting (originally roo-shooting) scene, as well as the cold and threatening rage of the loan shark who suspects she will not be paid, both of which are depicted as a specifically white aggression. Overall, its primary depiction of rage is directed inward, rather than outward, and in this way becomes narrowed down to emphasise a more individual, traumatic shame. That is, John’s petulant rage after his girlfriend’s rejection of his marriage proposal manifests in his determination to stolidly drink alone while she swims in the ocean. When she drowns while he is drunk and incapable to rescue her, his inaction becomes the primary source of his shame and exacerbates his self-focused, but repressed rage. The subsequent cycles of drinking (residents of The Yabba only drink beer, and plenty of it) and gambling (as he loses over and over at Two-Up) constitute a repetition of his original trauma over her drowning, and trigger the release of his repressed rage. While accompanying some locals during their drunken pig-shooting expedition, his rage finds an outlet, resulting in the death of his new acquaintance, Doc Tydon. Like John, Doc is the victim of a self-focused rage and shame at the death of his young child and the abdication of his responsibilities as the town’s doctor. Both John and Doc depict the collapse of authority and social order in the “Weird Melancholy” of the outback (Rayner 27), but this “subversion of the stereotype of capable, confident Australian masculinity” (37) and the decay of community and social structure remains static. However, the series does not push forward towards a moral outcome or a suggestion of better actions to inspire the viewer. Even his desperate suicide attempt, what he envisions as the only ‘ethical’ way out of his nightmare, ends in failure and is covered up by the local police. The narrative becomes circular: for John is returned to The Yabba every time he tries to leave, and even in the final scene he is back in Tiboonda, returned to where he started, standing at the front of his classroom. But importantly, this cycle mimics John’s cycle of unresolved shame, suggests an inability to ‘wake’ from this nightmare of repetition, with no acknowledgement of his individual history and his complicity in the traumatic events. Although John has outlived his suicide attempt, this does not validate his survival as a rebirth. Rather, John’s refusal of responsibility and the accompanying complicity of local authorities suggests the inevitability of further self-damaging rage, shame, and violence. Outback NoirBoth Wake in Fright and Mystery Road have been described as “outback noir” (Dolgopolov 12), combining characteristics of the Gothic, the Western, and film noir in their depictions of suffering and the realisation (or abdication) of justice. Greg Dolgopolov explains that while traditional “film noir explores the moral trauma of crime on its protagonists, who are often escaping personal suffering or harrowing incidents from their pasts” (12), these examples of Australian (outback) noir are primarily concerned with “ancestral trauma – that of both Indigenous and settler. Outback noir challenges official versions of events that glide over historical massacres and current injustices” (12-13).Wake in Fright’s focus on John’s personal suffering even as his crimes could become allegories for national trauma, aligns this story with traditional film noir. Mystery Road is caught up with a more collectivised form of trauma, and with the ‘colonialism’ of outback noir means this adaptation is more effective in locating self-rage and melancholia as integral to social and cultural dilemmas of contemporary Australia. Each series takes a different path to the treatment of race relations in Australia within a small and isolated rural context. Wake in Fright chooses to ignore this historical context, setting up the cycle of John’s repression of trauma as an individual fate, and he is trapped to repeat it. On the other hand, Mystery Road, just like its cinematic precursors (Mystery Road and Goldstone), deals with race as a specific theme. Mystery Road’s nod to the noir and the Western is emphasised by the character of Detective Jay Swan: “a lone gunslinger attempting to uphold law and order” (Ward 111), he swaggers around the small township in his cowboy hat, jeans, and boots, stoically searching for clues to the disappearance of two local teenagers. Since Swan is himself Aboriginal, this transforms the representation of authority and its failures depicted in Wake in Fright. While the police in Wake in Fright uphold the law only when convenient to their own goals, and further, to undertake criminal activities themselves, in Mystery Road the authority figures – Jay himself, and his counterpart, Senior Sergeant Emma James, are prominent in the community and dedicated to the pursuit of justice. It is highly significant that this sense of justice reaches beyond the present situation. Emma’s family, the Ballantynes, have been prominent landowners and farmers in the region for over one hundred years, and have always prided themselves on their benevolence towards the local Indigenous population. However, when Emma discovers that her great-grandfather was responsible for the massacre of several young Aboriginal men at the local waterhole, she is overcome by shame. In her horrified tears we see how the legacy of trauma, ever present for the Aboriginal population, is brought home to Emma herself. As the figurehead for justice in the town, Emma is determined to label the murders accurately as a “crime” which must “be answered.” In this acknowledgement and her subsequent apology to Dot, she finds some release from this ancient shame.The only Aboriginal characters in Wake in Fright are marginal to the narrative – taxi drivers who remain peripheral to the traumas within the small town, and thus remain positioned as innocent bystanders to its depravity. However, Mystery Road is careful to avoid such reductionist binaries. Just as Emma discovers the truth about her own family’s violence, Uncle Keith, the current Aboriginal patriarch, is exposed as a sexual predator. In both cases the men, leaders in the past and the present, consider themselves as ‘righteous’ in order to mask their enraged and violent behaviour. The moral issue here is more than a simplistic exposition on race, rather it demonstrates that complexity surrounds those who achieve power. When Dot ultimately ‘inherits’ responsibility for the Aboriginal Land Rights Commission this indicates that Mystery Road concludes with two female figures of authority, both looking out for the welfare of the community as a whole. Likewise, they are involved in seeking the young woman, Shevorne, who becomes the focus of abuse and grief, and her daughter. Although Jay is ultimately responsible for solving the crime at the heart of the series, Mystery Road strives to position futurity and responsibility in the hands of its female characters and their shared sense of community.In conclusion, both television adaptations of classic movies located in Australian outback noir have problematised rage within two vastly different contexts. The adaptations Wake in Fright and Mystery Road do share similar themes and concerns in their responses to past traumas and how that shapes Gothic representation of the outback in present day Australia. However, it is in their treatment of rage, shame, and violence that they diverge. Wake in Fright’s failure to convert rage beyond melancholia means that it fails to offer any hope of resolution, only an ongoing cycle of shame and violence. But rage, as a driver for injustice, can evolve into something more positive. In Mystery Road, the anger of both individuals and the community as a whole moves beyond good/bad and black/white stereotypes of outrage towards a more productive form of shame. In doing so, rage itself can elicit a new model for a more responsible contemporary Australian Gothic narrative.References Bazin, André. “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest.” Film Adaptation. 1948. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2000. 19-27.Bruhm, Steven. “The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 259-76.Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London: Routledge, 1993.Cartmell, Deborah. “100+ Years of Adaptations, or, Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy.” A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation. Ed. Deborah Cartmell. Chichester: Blackwell, 2012. 1-13.Dolgopolov, Greg. “Balancing Acts: Ivan Sen’s Goldstone and ‘Outback Noir.’” Metro 190 (2016): 8-13.Gelder, Ken. “Australian Gothic.” The Routledge Companion to Gothic. Eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy. London: Routledge, 2007. 115-23.Hogle, Jerrold E. “History, Trauma and the Gothic in Contemporary Western Fictions.” The Gothic World. Eds. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend. London: Routledge, 2014. 72-81.Kahane, Claire. “The Aesthetic Politics of Rage.” States of Rage: Emotional Eruption, Violence, and Social Change. Eds. Renée R. Curry and Terry L. Allison. New York: New York UP, 1996. 126-45.Perkins, Rachel, dir. Mystery Road. ABC, 2018.Rall, Denise N. “‘Shock and Awe’ and Memory: The Evocation(s) of Trauma in post-9/11 Artworks.” Memory and the Wars on Terror: Australian and British Perspectives. Eds. Jessica Gildersleeve and Richard Gehrmann. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 163-82.Rayner, Jonathan. Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000.Stenders, Kriv, dir. Wake in Fright. Roadshow Entertainment, 2017.Ward, Sarah. “Shadows of a Sunburnt Country: Mystery Road, the Western and the Conflicts of Contemporary Australia.” Screen Education 81 (2016): 110-15.Wheatley, Helen. “Haunted Houses, Hidden Rooms: Women, Domesticity and the Gothic Adaptation on Television.” Popular Television Drama: Critical Perspectives. Eds. Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. 149-65.

This article considers the relationship between depressed affect, a long-term refugee situation, and poetry among Afghan refugees in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the changing subjectivities of Afghan refugee poets, it explores the relationship between a perception of collective suffering, individual mental distress, and creativity in this community. Rather than establishing diagnostic criteria for depression among Afghans, the article is mostly concerned with the social and cultural ripples of psychological distress resulting from decades of war, displacement, and marginalization in the host country. It seeks to complicate biomedical understandings of depression by drawing on anthropological studies of dysphoria in Iran and on the collective experience of social suffering and structural violence. Through a discussion of four poets and their work, it explores the productive aspects of depression and the therapeutic, political, and transcendental potential of writing poetry.

This article explores some of the ways in which the natural environment – its management and exploitation – has informed artistic imagination and production in England in recent years. Laura Ouillon outlines of the state of English woodlands today, incorporating the research of art historians and cultural geographers to demonstrate that trees in England have become scarcer and scarcer. As a result, Ouillon reflects, the English relationship to forests is marked by a sense of lack and loss. This informs her analysis of a number of contemporary works of art and the peculiar form of environmental melancholia that imbues them. In particular, Ouillon examines the notion of ‘tree portraits’, in reference to the work Tacita Dean, Mat Collishaw, Lucian Freud and Alex Egan.

Actor Stephanie Collins reviews The Stamford Shakespeare Company's 2019 production of Twelfth Night, in which she played Fabia. The production's richly imagined Albanian-style Illyria created a vibrant aura of misrule. Collins's review includes material from her conversations with the director, designer, and other actors.

AbstractThis essay explores romantic responses to Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, known as the Ladies of Llangollen, arguing that Anna Seward and Anne Lister celebrated the Ladies’ relationship in order to melancholically enact the same-sex ties they were themselves unable to maintain. Hailed as both pioneering lesbians and chaste romantic friends, Butler and Ponsonby may appear unlikely candidates for queer recuperation. Their place within romantic literary history is equally contentious, their status as a female couple challenging notions of singular and masculine romantic subjectivity, and their creative production diverging from canonical textual forms. This essay nonetheless claims Butler and Ponsonby as queer romantics, arguing that the indeterminacy of their bond constitutes a commensurately queer resistance to definition. Their romanticism is similarly disclosed by that of their romantic acolytes, who lauded the Ladies’ home as an ideal of lasting affective community. Drawing on Judith Butler’s account of gender melancholia, this essay claims that Seward and Lister identified Butler and Ponsonby as embodying the hopes of queer community foreclosed in their own lives. Accordingly, they protected and promulgated the Ladies’ relationship in order to melancholically enact the same-sex attachments they were unable to establish enduringly or mourn publicly. In celebrating a model of flourishing female desire, Seward and Lister thus melancholically preserved their own lost love-objects, and affirmed the future instantiation of enduring queer communities.

Ecology has emerged as one of the most important sites of political struggle today. This issue of M/C invited authors to engage with “ecology” not as a siloised field of scientific enquiry, but rather as a way of contemporary thinking and a conceptual mode that emphasizes connectivity, conviviality, and inter-dependence. Proposing a radical revision of anthropocentrism in When Species Meet, Donna Haraway emphasises the dynamism of ecology as an entangled mesh, observing that, “the world is a knot in motion.” The “infolding” of human bodies with what we call “the environment” has never been clearer than the present moment—a time where humans may have undermined the viability of their own and other organism’s life on Earth. This impending ecological crisis has forced awareness of humanity’s dependence on the nonhuman lives that surround and envelop us. Gregory Bateson reminds us of the gravity of this mutuality with his assertion that the unit of survival is the organism-and-its-environment in a relationship, and that an organism which destroys its environment commits suicide (Bateson). Our unstable ecological future has prompted the emergence of an array of inter-disciplines, and new political, intellectual and cultural alignments including; ecomedia, eco-Marxism, ecological humanities, political ecology and animal studies. These thriving areas of scholarship often attempt to situate, “humans in ecological terms and non-humans in ethical terms,” while highlighting, as Val Plumwood has in her landmark Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, how, “anthropocentric perspectives and culture […] make us insensitive to our ecological place in the world’ (2). Despite the growing popular concern for the more-than-human world, Western populations are “citizens of science-led modernity, and are still investing in the narratives of progress” (Myerson 61). Climate change and the contemporary ecological crisis have provided an impetus and opportunity for collaborative scholarship and alternative engagements across the science/humanities divide. Deborah Bird Rose and Libby Robin remind us that the driving forces behind crises are primarily social and cultural. It is therefore essential for media and cultural theorists to be part of the ecological conversation as it seeks to develop new knowledge practices in order to “engage with connectivity and commitment in a time of crisis and concern” (Rose and Robin). Since James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis in 1982, conceptualising the Earth as a self-regulating, evolving system, notions of equilibrium and harmony have pervaded ecological thinking. Gaia is “a powerfully productive scientific metaphor and has considerable value as a way to imagine the planet as at once vulnerable and vast, enduring and evolving” (Garrard 201). Because the study of ecology concerns life and the complex contingencies of all of its relationships, applying ecological thought to contemporary “matters of concern” (Latour) can alert us to the limitations of our knowledge, while simultaneously impelling us to act from our enmeshed position in a precariously balanced world. At the same time, as our Feature for this issue recognises, ecological metaphors can paradoxically damage ecologies. Evidently the theme of ecology has contemporary resonance as we were both excited and overwhelmed with the sheer number (over 20) of papers we received and their theoretical diversity, and we regret that we could not include more than those that follow. Our sincere gratitude goes to our generous referees—all 54 of them. And a special thanks to our colleagues (in Macquarie University’s Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies, and Environment and Geography) who we relied upon when reviewers fell through. If we then include the efforts of all our contributors, as well as M/C editors Peta Mitchell and Axel Bruns, this issue is the culmination of the collaborative (and mostly invisible) labour of around 89 people. Thank you. Invisible labour is one focus of Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller’s feature article for this issue, “The Real Future of the Media.” It is both an eco-Marxist critique of the media industries and a call to action for all media, communications and cultural studies scholars to place ecological issues at the core of their work. Far from the “end of materiality” promised by virtual media’s technological utopia, Maxwell and Miller demonstrate the ways in which the media industries and technophiles alike, tend to obscure not only inequitable and dangerous labour conditions but also the media’s negative environmental impacts. With some staggering statistics around ICT/CE planned obsolescence, E-waste, exposure of workers to toxicity, they emphasise that ecological metaphors more often blind us to harsh environmental realities, rather than illuminate them. By focusing on the not-so-green outcomes of contemporary media practice, they remind us that while ecology can be a useful conceptual mode, it is important to avoid divorcing metaphor from materiality, lest we confuse the map with the territory (Alfred Korzybski). In a similar political vein, in “Gentrifying Climate Change: Ecological Modernisation and the Cultural Politics of Definition”, Ben Glasson remains sceptical that our current political and economic system can adequately address the challenges that climate change will bring. Focused on the shortcomings of the discourse of ecological modernisation (EM), Glasson argues that environmentalism, rather than being integrated into capitalism, has been co-opted, through a process of gentrification, without necessarily, any tangible environmental benefits. The next two articles explore filmic portrayals of ecological disaster. Described by one referee as a “breath of fresh air in the field of post-apocalyptic criticism,” Tim Matts’s and Aidan Tynan’s timely piece places Lars von Trier’s recent film Melancholia, in the broader context of humanity’s sense of impending annihilation. Instead of mourning for the loss of Earth, the authors suggest that Melancholia’s central character’s overwhelming melancholy enables a “radical form of ecological openness.” While in “Spectre of the Past, Vision of the Future,” Tamas Molnar celebrates filmmaker Arthus-Bertrand’s Home as a climate change communication text which uses ritual to influence audience’s environmental behaviour. Molnar argues that Home transforms anthropocentric hubris into ecological awareness, as the film’s spectators begin to reconcile the spectral haunting of human-induced environmental devastation with a future vision of personal responsibility and hope for the suffering body of the Earth. Anita Howarth focuses on another suffering body to explore the convergence of two ecologies which combine to form an “ecology of protest” in “A Hunger Strike-the Ecology of a Protest: The Case of Bahraini activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja.” Howarth argues that through an act of corporeal-environmental (self)destruction, the emaciated body of Bahraini hunger striker Abdulhadi al-Khawaja was transformed into a political spectacle by a global media ecology. Howarth explores how the interpenetration between the ecology of the organism-and-its-environment, and the ecology of a global media system, impacts on protest movements and social justice. The erasure of the rabbit’s suffering body becomes Katherine Wright’s focus in “Bunnies, Bilbies, and the Ethic of Ecological Remembrance” where she ponders the more sinister dimensions of substituting the Easter bunny with the Easter bilby. Analysing how stories impact on ecological thinking and attitudes, Wright critiques the problematic native/invasive dichotomy that sees the native bilby valued over the invasive rabbit; slaughtered in vast numbers in Australia. In place of this binary she proposes an ethic of “ecological remembrance,” which recognises the importance of memory in sustaining an ethics of more-than-human ecological care. The following two articles emphasise the importance of storytelling to develop Indigenous ecological understanding and a decolonising ethic. With a focus on Australian Aboriginal story ecology, “Growing up the Future: Children’s Stories and Aboriginal Ecology,” Blaze Kwaymullina et al. explore two works of children’s literature which emphasise the sentience of Country and the responsibilities of future generations to protect fragile ecologies. They argue that through story, children will learn to “enhance the pattern of life,” rather than destroy it. While in “Ecology, Ontology and Pedagogy at Camp Coorong,” Bindi MacGill et al. traverse another pedagogy of Indigenous storytelling which has developed at Camp Coorong: Race Relations and Cultural Education Centre 200km south of Adelaide. An initiative of Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority, Camp Coorong is a site of place-based education which passes on ethics of caring for country to students in the Murray-Darling Basin. Through the “gift of story” Camp Coorong has become a site of active decolonisation as non-Indigenous students and teachers are able to hear stories of Aboriginal dispossession, survival, and resilience. By creating a, “pedagogy of discomfort,” Camp Coorong encourages ecological responsibility and commitment, while engaging in the vital task of decolonising Australian culture and environments. Applying the ecological framework to a very different form of storytelling, Paul Makeham, Bree Hadley and Joon-Yee Kwok discuss what “ecological thinking” can offer studies of the performing arts sector in Brisbane, Australia. Through a case study of Aus-e-stage Mapping Service, an online application that maps data about performing arts practitioners, organisations and audiences, “A ‘Value Ecology’ Approach to the Performing Arts” demonstrates the benefits of ecologically grounded rhizomatic thinking in assessing a theatre industry’s “health” through relationships and flows. Grounded in the theory of French philosopher Michel Serres, Timothy Barker’s, “Information and Atmospheres: Exploring the Relationship between the Natural Environment and Information Aesthetics” is a thoughtful exploration of the way an array of artworks forges connections between “nature” and information. Through information visualisation and sonification, all three examples give a new sense of materiality to the atmosphere, with EcoArtTech appearing as our cover image for this issue. This journal edition is populated by papers which explore different niches in ecological thinking, that are perhaps best understood in Latourian terms as an assemblage. The broad scope covered in the following papers demonstrates that ecology is an unsettled concept, made fertile by instability and excess. This issue of M/C hovers in the borderlands of inter-disciplinarity, where creative verve thrives in contact zones. We hope you enjoy it! References Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. London: Paladin, Granada Publishing, 1973. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2012. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2007. (Kindle edition) Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004). 27 June 2012 ‹http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v30/30n2.Latour.html›. Lovelock, James. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Moreton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2007. Myerson, George. Ecology and the End of Postmodernity. London: Icon Books, 2002. Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. Routledge; London and New York, 2002. Rose, Deborah Bird, and Libby Robin. “The Ecological Humanities in Action.” Australian Humanities Review 31-32. (April 2004). 27 June 2012