Download or read book Melancholy and the Archive written by Jonathan Boulter and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-05-19 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Melancholy and the Archive examines how trauma, history and memory are represented in key works of major contemporary writers such as David Mitchell, Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami and Jose Saramago. The book explores how these authors construct crucial relationships between sites of memory-the archive becomes a central trope here-and the self that has been subjected to various traumas, various losses. The archive-be it a bureaucratic office (Saramago), an underground bunker (Auster), a geographical space or landscape (Mitchell) or even a hole (Murakami)-becomes the means by which the self attempts to preserve and conserve his or her sense of history even as the economy of trauma threatens to erase the grounds of such preservation: as the subject or self is threatened so the archive becomes a festishized site wherein history is housed, accommodated, created, even fabricated. The archive, in Freudian terms, becomes a space of melancholy precisely as the subject preserves not only a personal history or a culture's history, but also the history of the traumas that necessitates the creation of the archive as such.
Download or read book Observations on Madness and Melancholy written by John Haslam and published by . This book was released on 1809 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Melancholy of Anatomy written by Shelley Jackson and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amusing, touching, and unsettling, The Melancholy of Anatomy is that most wonderful of fictions, one that makes us see the world in an entirely new light. Here is the body turned inside out, its members set free, its humors released upon the world. Hearts bigger than planets devour light and warp the space around them; the city of London has a menstrual flow that gushes through its underground pipes; gobs of phlegm cement friendships and sexual relationships; and a floating fetus larger than a human becomes the new town pastor. In this debut story collection, Shelley Jackson rewrites our private passages, and translates the dumb show of the body into prose as gorgeous as it is unhygienic.
Download or read book W G Sebald Image Archive Modernity written by J .J. Long and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2007-11-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. G. Sebald is widely acknowledged as one of the most significant writers to have emerged onto the global literary scene in recent decades, and is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Nabokov, Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Proust, and Primo Levi. W. G. Sebald-Image, Archive, Modernity offers a unique and original reading of Sebald's dazzling oeuvre, arguing that his work is concerned first and foremost with the problem of modernity. It focuses in particular on the numerous archival institutions and processes that lie at the very heart of modernity and are repeatedly thematised throughout Sebald's work.Adopting a broad definition of the archive to encompass a wide range of material practices, the book analyses the function of photography, museums, libraries, and other systems of knowledge to which Sebald's texts obsessively return. Following Foucault, such systems are seen as central to the exercise of power and the constitution of subjectivity in modernity. By undertaking a differentiated analysis that is attuned to the formal complexities of Sebald's texts, this book shows that Sebald's engagement with structures of power-knowledge is characterised by a melancholy struggle to assert autonomous selfhood in the face of the institutional and discursive determinants of subjectivity.
Download or read book British Romanticism and the Archive written by David Kerler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-06-06 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking its cue from Jacques Derrida’s concept of le mal d’archive, this study explores the interrelations between the experience of loss, melancholia, archives and their (self-)destructive tendencies, surfacing in different forms of spectrality, in selected poetry of British Romanticism. It argues that the British Romantics were highly influenced by the period’s archival fever – manifesting itself in various historical, material, technological and cultural aspects – and (implicitly) reflected and engaged with these discourses and materialities/medialities in their works. This is scrutinized by focusing on two basal, closely related facets: the subject’s feverish desire to archive and the archive’s (self-)destructive tendencies, which may also surface in an ambivalent, melancholic relishing in the archived object’s presence within its absence. Through this new theoretical perspective, details and coherence previously gone unnoticed shall be laid bare, ultimately contributing to a new and more profound understanding of British Romanticism(s). It will be shown that the various discursive and material manifestations of archives and archival practices not only echo the period’s technological-cultural and historical developments along with its incisive experiencing of loss, but also fundamentally determine Romantic subjectivity and aesthetics.
Download or read book Melancholy written by Jon Fosse and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023 "Melancholy" takes us deep inside a painter's fragile consciousness, vulnerable to everything but therefore uniquely able to see its beauty and its light.
Download or read book A User s Guide to Melancholy written by Mary Ann Lund and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A User's Guide to Melancholy takes Robert Burton's encyclopaedic masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy (first published in 1621) as a guide to one of the most perplexing, elusive, attractive, and afflicting diseases of the Renaissance. Burton's Anatomy is perhaps the largest, strangest, and most unwieldy self-help book ever written. Engaging with the rich cultural and literary framework of melancholy, this book traces its causes, symptoms, and cures through Burton's writing. Each chapter starts with a case study of melancholy - from the man who was afraid to urinate in case he drowned his town to the girl who purged a live eel - as a way into exploring the many facets of this mental affliction. A User's Guide to Melancholy presents in an accessible and illustrated format the colourful variety of Renaissance melancholy, and contributes to contemporary discussions about wellbeing by revealing the earlier history of mental health conditions.
Download or read book The Anatomy of Melancholy written by Robert Burton and published by . This book was released on 1886 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Melancholy of Resistance written by László Krasznahorkai and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize
Download or read book An Archive of Feelings written by Ann Cvetkovich and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2003-03-14 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this bold new work of cultural criticism, Ann Cvetkovich develops a queer approach to trauma. She argues for the importance of recognizing—and archiving—accounts of trauma that belong as much to the ordinary and everyday as to the domain of catastrophe. An Archive of Feelings contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by too strict a division between the public and the private, has overlooked the experiences of women and queers. Rejecting the pathologizing understandings of trauma that permeate medical and clinical discourses on the subject, Cvetkovich develops instead a sex-positive approach missing even from most feminist work on trauma. She challenges the field to engage more fully with sexual trauma and the wide range of feelings in its vicinity, including those associated with butch-femme sex and aids activism and caretaking. An Archive of Feelings brings together oral histories from lesbian activists involved in act up/New York; readings of literature by Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Cherríe Moraga, and Shani Mootoo; videos by Jean Carlomusto and Pratibha Parmar; and performances by Lisa Kron, Carmelita Tropicana, and the bands Le Tigre and Tribe 8. Cvetkovich reveals how activism, performance, and literature give rise to public cultures that work through trauma and transform the conditions producing it. By looking closely at connections between sexuality, trauma, and the creation of lesbian public cultures, Cvetkovich makes those experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of trauma culture the defining principles of a new construction of sexual trauma—one in which trauma catalyzes the creation of cultural archives and political communities.
Download or read book What Remains written by Dora Osborne and published by Camden House (NY). This book was released on 2020 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the archival turn in contemporary German memory culture, drawing on recent memorials, documentaries, and prose narratives that engage with the material legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust.
Download or read book Left Wing Melancholia written by Enzo Traverso and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their political struggle and how they have thought about their past since. Throughout the twentieth century, argues Left-Wing Melancholia, from classical Marxism to psychoanalysis to the advent of critical theory, a culture of defeat and its emotional overlay of melancholy have characterized the leftist understanding of the political in history and in theoretical critique. Drawing on a vast and diverse archive in theory, testimony, and image and on such thinkers as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and others, the intellectual historian Enzo Traverso explores the varying nature of left melancholy as it has manifested in a feeling of guilt for not sufficiently challenging authority, in a fear of surrendering in disarray and resignation, in mourning the human costs of the past, and in a sense of failure for not realizing utopian aspirations. Yet hidden within this melancholic tradition are the resources for a renewed challenge to prevailing regimes of historicity, a passion that has the power to reignite the dialectic of revolutionary thought.
Download or read book Against Happiness written by Eric G. Wilson and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2008-01-22 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans are addicted to happiness. When we're not popping pills, we leaf through scientific studies that take for granted our quest for happiness, or read self-help books by everyone from armchair philosophers and clinical psychologists to the Dalai Lama on how to achieve a trouble-free life: Stumbling on Happiness; Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment; The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. The titles themselves draw a stark portrait of the war on melancholy. More than any other generation, Americans of today believe in the transformative power of positive thinking. But who says we're supposed to be happy? Where does it say that in the Bible, or in the Constitution? In Against Happiness, the scholar Eric G. Wilson argues that melancholia is necessary to any thriving culture, that it is the muse of great literature, painting, music, and innovation—and that it is the force underlying original insights. Francisco Goya, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, and Abraham Lincoln were all confirmed melancholics. So enough Prozac-ing of our brains. Let's embrace our depressive sides as the wellspring of creativity. What most people take for contentment, Wilson argues, is living death, and what the majority takes for depression is a vital force. In Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, Wilson suggests it would be better to relish the blues that make humans people.
Download or read book Agents of Liberations written by Zoltán Kékesi and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book explores representations of the Holocaust in contemporary art practices. Through carefully selected art projects, the author illuminates the specific historical, cultural, and political circumstances that influence the way we speak—or do not speak—about the Holocaust. The book's international focus brings into view film projects made by key artists reflecting critically upon forms of Holocaust memory in a variety of geographical contexts. Kékesi connects the ethical implications of the memory of the Holocaust with a critical analysis of contemporary societies, focusing upon artists who are deeply engaged in doing both of the above within three regions: Eastern Europe (especially Poland), Germany, and Israel. The case studies apply current methods of contemporary art theory, unfolding their implications in terms of memory politics and social critique.
Download or read book J M Coetzee and the Archive written by Marc Farrant and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making extensive use of the rich archival material contained within the Coetzee collections in Texas and South Africa, from the earliest drafts and notebooks to the research notes and digital records that document his later career as both writer and academic, this volume investigates the historical, cultural and aesthetic contexts of Coetzee's oeuvre. Cutting-edge and interdisciplinary in approach, the book looks both at the prolific archival traces of Coetzee's early and middle work as well as examines his more recent work (which has yet to be archived), and a wide range of materials beyond the manuscripts, including family albums, school notebooks and correspondence. Navigating Coetzee's interests in areas as diverse as literature, photography, autobiography, philosophy, animals and embodied life, this is also an exploration of the archive as both theory and practice. It raises questions about the tensions, contradictions and discoveries of archival research, and suggests that a literary engagement with the past is crucial to a recovery of culture in the present.
Download or read book The Anatomy of Melancholy written by Robert Burton and published by . This book was released on 1862 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Melancholy of Race written by Anne Anlin Cheng and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cheng proposes that racial identification is itself already a melancholic act--a social category that is imaginatively supported through a dynamic of loss and compensation, by which the racial other is at once rejected and retained. Using psychoanalytic theories on mourning and melancholia as inroads into her subject, Cheng offers a closely observed and carefully reasoned account of the minority experience as expressed in works of art by, and about, Asian-Americans and African-Americans. She argues that the racial minority and dominant American culture both suffer from racial melancholia and that this insight is crucial to a productive reimagining of progressive politics.