Download or read book The Nature of Melancholy written by Jennifer Radden and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning 24 centuries, this anthology collects over 30 pieces of Western writing about melancholy and related conditions. It unravels an ongoing conversation across centuries and continents as thinkers interpret, respond, and build on each other's work.
Download or read book Melancholy and the Otherness of God written by Alina N. Feld and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An impressive study that prompts the reader toward philosophical reflection on the hermeneutics of melancholy in its relation to maturing theological understanding and cultivation of a profound self-consciousness. Melancholy has been interpreted as a deadly sin or demonic temptation to non-being, yet its history of interpretation reveals a progressive coming to terms with the dark mood that ultimately unveils it as the self's own ground and a trace of the abysmal nature of God. The book advances two provocative claims: that far from being a contingent condition, melancholy has been progressively acknowledged as constitutive of subjectivity as such, a trace of divine otherness and pathos, and that the effort to transcend melancholy-like Perseus vanquishing Medusa-is a necessary labor of maturing self-consciousness. Reductive attempts to eliminate it, besides being dangerously utopian, risk overcoming the labor of the soul that makes us human. This study sets forth a rigorous scholarly argument that spans several disciplines, including philosophy, theology, psychology, and literary studies.
Download or read book Melancholy written by László F. Földényi (Foldenyi) and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alberto Manguel praises the Hungarian writer László Földényi as “one of the most brilliant essayists of our time.” Földényi’s extraordinary Melancholy, with its profusion of literary, ecclesiastical, artistic, and historical insights, gives proof to such praise. His book, part history of the term melancholy and part analysis of the melancholic disposition, explores many centuries to explore melancholy’s ambiguities. Along the way Földényi discovers the unrecognized role melancholy may play as a source of energy and creativity in a well-examined life. Földényi begins with a tour of the history of the word melancholy, from ancient Greece to the medieval era, the Renaissance, and modern times. He finds the meaning of melancholy has always been ambiguous, even paradoxical. In our own times it may be regarded either as a psychic illness or a mood familiar to everyone. The author analyzes the complexities of melancholy and concludes that its dual nature reflects the inherent tension of birth and mortality. To understand the melancholic disposition is to find entry to some of the deepest questions one’s life. This distinguished translation brings Földényi’s work directly to English-language readers for the first time.
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 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: 400 years after The Anatomy of Melancholy, this book guides readers through Renaissance medicine's disease of the mind.
Download or read book Saturn and Melancholy written by Raymond Klibansky and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-11-21 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saturn and Melancholy remains an iconic text in art history, intellectual history, and the study of culture, despite being long out of print in English. Rooted in the tradition established by Aby Warburg and the Warburg Library, this book has deeply influenced understandings of the interrelations between the humanities disciplines since its first publication in English in 1964. This new edition makes the original English text available for the first time in decades. Saturn and Melancholy offers an unparalleled inquiry into the origin and development of the philosophical and medical theories on which the ancient conception of the temperaments was based and discusses their connections to astrological and religious ideas. It also traces representations of melancholy in literature and the arts up to the sixteenth century, culminating in a landmark analysis of Dürer's most famous engraving, Melencolia I. This edition features Raymond Klibansky's additional introduction and bibliographical amendments for the German edition, as well as translations of source material and 155 original illustrations. An essay on the complex publication history of this pathbreaking project - which almost did not see the light of day - covers more than eighty years, including its more recent heritage. Making new a classic book that has been out of print for over four decades, this expanded edition presents fresh insights about Saturn and Melancholy and its legacy as a precursor to modern interdisciplinary studies.
Download or read book Lincoln s Melancholy written by Joshua Wolf Shenk and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006-10-02 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A nuanced psychological portrait of Abraham Lincoln that finds his legendary political strengths rooted in his most personal struggles. Giving shape to the deep depression that pervaded Lincoln's adult life, Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy reveals how this illness influenced both the President’s character and his leadership. Mired in personal suffering as a young man, Lincoln forged a hard path toward mental health. Shenk draws on seven years of research from historical record, interviews with Lincoln scholars, and contemporary research on depression to understand the nature of Lincoln’s unhappiness. In the process, Shenk discovers that the President’s coping strategies—among them, a rich sense of humor and a tendency toward quiet reflection—ultimately helped him to lead the nation through its greatest turmoil. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice SELECTED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Washington Post Book World, Atlanta Journal-Constituion, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette As Featured on the History Channel documentary Lincoln “Fresh, fascinating, provocative.”—Sanford D. Horwitt, San Francisco Chronicle “Some extremely beautiful prose and fine political rhetoric and leaves one feeling close to Lincoln, a considerable accomplishment.”—Andrew Solomon, New York Magazine “A profoundly human and psychologically important examination of the melancholy that so pervaded Lincoln's life.”—Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., author of An Unquiet Mind
Download or read book Philosophy and Melancholy written by Ilit Ferber and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-12 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the concept of melancholy in Walter Benjamin's early writings. Rather than focusing on the overtly melancholic subject matter of Benjamin's work or the unhappy circumstances of his own fate, Ferber considers the concept's implications for his philosophy. Informed by Heidegger's discussion of moods and their importance for philosophical thought, she contends that a melancholic mood is the organizing principle or structure of Benjamin's early metaphysics and ontology. Her novel analysis of Benjamin's arguments about theater and language features a discussion of the Trauerspiel book that is amongst the first in English to scrutinize the baroque plays themselves. Philosophy and Melancholy also contributes to the history of philosophy by establishing a strong relationship between Benjamin and other philosophers, including Leibniz, Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger.
Download or read book American Melancholy written by Laura D. Hirshbein and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As American Melancholy reveals, if you read about depression anywhere today--medical journal, popular magazine, National Institute of Mental Health pamphlet, or pharmaceutical company drug promotional literature--you will find three main pieces of information either explicitly stated or strongly implied: depression is a disease (like any other physical disease); it is extraordinarily prevalent in the world; and it occurs about twice as frequently in women as in men. Yet, depression was not classified as a disease until the 1980 publication of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-III (DSM-III). How is it that such an illness, thought to affect between 14 and 17 million Americans, was not specifically defined until the late twentieth century? American Melancholy traces the growth of depression as an object of medical study and as a consumer commodity and illustrates how and why depression came to be such a huge medical, social, and cultural phenomenon. It is the first book to address gender issues in the construction of depression, explores key questions of how its diagnosis was developed, how it has been used, and how we should question its application in American society.
Download or read book Melancholy and the Landscape written by Jacky Bowring and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-07 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written as an advocacy of melancholy’s value as part of landscape experience, this book situates the concept within landscape’s aesthetic traditions, and reveals how it is a critical part of ethics and empathy. With a history that extends back to ancient times, melancholy has hovered at the edges of the appreciation of landscape, including the aesthetic exertions of the eighteenth-century. Implicated in the more formal categories of the Sublime and the Picturesque, melancholy captures the subtle condition of beautiful sadness. The book proposes a range of conditions which are conducive to melancholy, and presents examples from each, including: The Void, The Uncanny, Silence, Shadows and Darkness, Aura, Liminality, Fragments, Leavings, Submersion, Weathering and Patina.
Download or read book A Field Guide to Melancholy written by Jacky Bowring and published by Oldcastle Books. This book was released on 2016-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Melancholy is a critical part of what it is to be human, yet everything from Prozac to self-help books seems intent on removing it from existence. A Field Guide to Melancholy surveys this ambivalent concept. Melancholy is found in historic traditions, and in contemporary society it becomes a fashion statement in the subculture of the Emo. Still, shelves are full of books claiming to help us overcome it. By drawing on a range of disciplines from psychology to design, this book provides a deeper look at one of the most elusive and enigmatic of human conditions.
Download or read book Finding Hope in the Age of Melancholy written by David S. Awbrey and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the moment of his greatest professional success, vetteran newspaperman & author of this book was struck by a crippling depression. Neither psychotherapy nor Prozac helped him, & it wasn't until he began a painful probe of his life & an investigation into depression's larger issues that he saw a way out. Not a depression memoir, Finding Hope in the Age of Melancholy uses the author's personal experience to launch a profound & inspiring exploration of the depression epidemic in our society. Weaving literature, philosophy, economics, religion, & medicine into a discussion about the roots of our barren culture, the author comes to provocative conclusions. He shows how the nature of our society is often as much to blame for depression as brain chemistry is, how depression can be a positive goad to creativity & deeper self-understanding, & why religious belief & community involvement are often more potent therapies than drugs & the analyst's couch. This is a deeply helpful & illuminating book for all who are looking for meaning in their lives
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 The Melancholy Art written by Michael Ann Holly and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-24 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why the art historian's craft is a uniquely melancholy art Melancholy is not only about sadness, despair, and loss. As Renaissance artists and philosophers acknowledged long ago, it can engender a certain kind of creativity born from a deep awareness of the mutability of life and the inevitable cycle of birth and death. Drawing on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the intellectual history of the history of art, The Melancholy Art explores the unique connections between melancholy and the art historian's craft. Though the objects art historians study are materially present in our world, the worlds from which they come are forever lost to time. In this eloquent and inspiring book, Michael Ann Holly traces how this disjunction courses through the history of art and shows how it can give rise to melancholic sentiments in historians who write about art. She confronts pivotal and vexing questions in her discipline: Why do art historians write in the first place? What kinds of psychic exchanges occur between art objects and those who write about them? What institutional and personal needs does art history serve? What is lost in historical writing about art? The Melancholy Art looks at how melancholy suffuses the work of some of the twentieth century's most powerful and poetic writers on the history of art, including Alois Riegl, Franz Wickhoff, Adrian Stokes, Michael Baxandall, Meyer Schapiro, and Jacques Derrida. A disarmingly personal meditation by one of our most distinguished art historians, this book explains why to write about art is to share in a kind of intertwined pleasure and loss that is the very essence of melancholy.
Download or read book The Fecund s Melancholy Daughter written by Brent Hayward and published by ChiZine. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Beautifully written and morally ambivalent, this complex tale will appeal to readers of Gene Wolfe and China Miéville.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review The city is crumbling. Clouds over Nowy Solum have not parted in a hundred years. Gods have deserted their temples. In the last days of a dying city, the decadent chatelaine chooses a forbidden lover, separating twin outcasts and setting them on independent trajectories that might finally bring down the palace. Then, screaming from the skies, a lone god reappears and a limbless prophet is carried through South Gate, into Nowy Solum, with a message for all: Beyond the city, something ancient and monumental has come awake. “A breathtaking success of a fantasy story. Find yourself a copy, brew some strong coffee, and allow your mind to be blown.” —The Arcanist “Reading it is like waking up in the wrong bed, in the wrong apartment, under the wrong sun. The strangest part is the insidious way the strangeness of Hayward’s world becomes familiar as the story progresses . . . By turns surreal, macabre and stunningly violent, The Fecund’s Melancholy Daughter is dreamlike in its strangeness and complexity. Like a dream, it is difficult to define and difficult to shake.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Download or read book On the Brink of Everything written by Parker J. Palmer and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This impassioned book invites readers to the deep end of life where authentic soul work and human transformation become pressing concerns.” —Publishers Weekly 2019 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medalist in the Aging/Death & Dying Category From bestselling author Parker J. Palmer comes a brave and beautiful book for all who want to age reflectively, seeking new insights and life-giving ways to engage in the world. “Age itself,” he says, “is no excuse to wade in the shallows. It’s a reason to dive deep and take creative risks.” Looking back on eight decades of life—and on his work as a writer, teacher, and activist—Palmer explores what he’s learning about self and world, inviting readers to explore their own experience. In prose and poetry—and three downloadable songs written for the book by the gifted Carrie Newcomer—he meditates on the meanings of life, past, present, and future. With compassion and chutzpah, gravitas and levity, Palmer writes about cultivating a vital inner and outer life, finding meaning in suffering and joy, and forming friendships across the generations that bring new life to young and old alike. “This book is a companion for not merely surviving a fractured world, but embodying—like Parker—the fiercely honest and gracious wholeness that is ours to claim at every stage of life.” —Krista Tippett, New York Times-bestselling author of Becoming Wise “A wondrously rich mix of reality and possibility, comfort and story, helpful counsel and poetry, in the voice of a friend . . . This is a book of immense gratitude, consolation, and praise.” —Naomi Shihab Nye, National Book Award finalist
Download or read book Melancholy written by F. László Földényi and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Földényi's extraordinary Melancholy ... part history of the term melancholy and part analysis of the melancholic disposition, explores many centuries to explore melancholy's ambiguities. Along the way Földényi discovers the unrecognized role melancholy may play as a source of energy and creativity in a well-examined life. Földényi begins with a tour of the history of the word melancholy, from ancient Greece to the medieval era, the Renaissance, and modern times. He finds the meaning of melancholy has always been ambiguous, even paradoxical. In our own times it may be regarded either as a psychic illness or a mood familiar to everyone. The author analyzes the complexities of melancholy and concludes that its dual nature reflects the inherent tension of birth and mortality. To understand the melancholic disposition is to find entry to some of the deepest questions one's life."--Amazon.com.
