Download or read book Melancholic Joy written by Brian Treanor and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-14 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, we find ourselves surrounded by numerous reasons to despair, from loneliness, suffering and death at an individual level to societal alienation, oppression, sectarian conflict and war. No honest assessment of life can take place without facing up to these facts and it is not surprising that more and more people are beginning to suspect that the human story will end in tragedy. However, this focus on despair does not paint a complete and accurate picture of reality, which is also inflected with beauty and goodness. Working with examples from poetry and literature, including Virginia Woolf and Jack Gilbert and the films of Terrence Malick, Melancholic Joy offers an honest assessment of the human condition. It unflinchingly acknowledges the everyday frustrations and extraordinary horrors that generate despair and argues that the appropriate response is to take up joy again, not in an attempt to ignore or dismiss evil, but rather as part of a “melancholic joy” that accepts the mystery of a world both beautiful and brutal.
Download or read book Melancholic Joy written by Brian Treanor and published by Bloomsbury Academic. This book was released on 2021-01-14 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, we find ourselves surrounded by numerous reasons to despair, from loneliness, suffering and death at an individual level to societal alienation, oppression, sectarian conflict and war. No honest assessment of life can take place without facing up to these facts and it is not surprising that more and more people are beginning to suspect that the human story will end in tragedy. However, this focus on despair does not paint a complete and accurate picture of reality, which is also inflected with beauty and goodness. Working with examples from poetry and literature, including Virginia Woolf and Jack Gilbert and the films of Terrence Malick, Melancholic Joy offers an honest assessment of the human condition. It unflinchingly acknowledges the everyday frustrations and extraordinary horrors that generate despair and argues that the appropriate response is to take up joy again, not in an attempt to ignore or dismiss evil, but rather as part of a “melancholic joy” that accepts the mystery of a world both beautiful and brutal.
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 Melancholic Freedom written by David Kyuman Kim and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-25 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does agency -- the capacity to make choices and to act in the world -- matter to us? Why is it meaningful that our intentions have effects in the world, that they reflect our sense of identity, that they embody what we value? What kinds of motivations are available for political agency and judgment in an age that lacks the enthusiasm associated with the great emancipatory movements for civil rights and gender equality? What are the conditions for the possibility of being an effective agent when the meaning of democracy has become less transparent? David Kyuman Kim addresses these crucial questions by uncovering the political, moral, philosophical, and religious dimensions of human agency. Kim treats agency as a form of religious experience that reflects implicit and explicit notions of the good. Of particular concern are the moral, political, and religious motivations that underpin an understanding of agency as meaningful action. Through a critical engagement with the work of theorists such as Judith Butler, Charles Taylor, and Stanley Cavell, Kim argues that late modern and postmodern agency is found most effectively at work in what he calls "projects of regenerating agency" or critical and strategic responses to loss. Agency as melancholic freedom begins and endures, Kim maintains, through the moral and psychic losses associated with a broad range of experiences, including the moral identities shaped by secularized modernity and the multifold forms of alienation experienced by those who suffer the indignities of racial, gender, class, and sexuality discrimination and oppression. Kim calls for renewing the sense of urgency in our political and moral engagements by seeing agency as a vocation, where the aspiration for self-transformation and the human need for hope are fundamental concerns.
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 Chapel of Inadvertent Joy written by Jeffrey McDaniel and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Reading Jeffrey McDaniel's gorgeously dark and utterly compelling Chapel of Inadvertent Joy reminds me that he is probably the most important poet in America. The book in your hands was written by a master of metaphor and a poet of huge imagination and fierce ingenuity, a fine antidote to realism. Get this voice in your head."—Major Jackson
Download or read book Lacan and Romanticism written by Daniela Garofalo and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2019-03-25 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lacan and Romanticism uses the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to deliver progressive readings of Romanticism by examining canonical Romantic authors such as William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and Jane Austen, as well as lesser-known writers such as the graveyard poets and Sarah Scott. The contributors develop innovative approaches to Lacanian literary studies, focusing on neglected or emergent areas of Lacan's thought and approaching Lacan's best-known work in unexpected ways. The essay topics include the visible and seeable, war, the death drive, nonhuman sexualities, sublimation, loss and mourning, utopia, capitalism, fantasy, and topology, and they range from the mid-eighteenth through the early decades of the nineteenth centuries. The book reveals new ways of thinking about art and literature with psychoanalytic theory and suggests how theoretical approaches can contribute meaningfully to literary studies in general.
Download or read book Carnal Hermeneutics written by Richard Kearney and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on a hermeneutic tradition in which accounts of carnal embodiment are overlooked, misunderstood, or underdeveloped, this work initiates a new field of study and concern. Carnal Hermeneutics provides a philosophical approach to the body as interpretation. Transcending the traditional dualism of rational understanding and embodied sensibility, the volume argues that our most carnal sensations are already interpretations. Because interpretation truly goes “all the way down,” carnal hermeneutics rejects the opposition of language to sensibility, word to flesh, text to body. In this volume, an impressive array of today’s preeminent philosophers seek to interpret the surplus of meaning that arises from our carnal embodiment, its role in our experience and understanding, and its engagement with the wider world.
Download or read book Pain without Boundaries Inquiries across Cultures written by Roy F. Fox and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In May 2013, 28 scholars from 19 countries gathered in Prague, Czech Republic, to explore the many complex issues surrounding pain. This unique meeting, the 4th Global Making Sense of Pain Conference, allowed participants to remain together for three days as they explored perspectives from many different disciplines -- from medicine to music; from art to medical humanities; from psychology to writing and rhetoric; from cognition to intuition. The multidisciplinary and cross-cultural nature of the conference provided an engaging forum for scholars to draw inspiration and knowledge on the nature and function of pain, as perceived through the lenses of various fields and research methodologies. This volume presents a sample of the contributions from this conference, divided into the following categories: Pain and Thinking, Contemplating Pain, Creating from Pain, and Personalising Pain.
Download or read book The Play of Goodness written by Jacob Benjamins and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the enduring claims in the Christian tradition is that creation is good. Given the diversity of experience and the abundance of suffering in the world, however, such an affirmation is not always straightforward. The Play of Goodness provides a phenomenology of creation’s goodness that clarifies the ongoing relevance of the doctrine today. It argues that what is “good” about creation is not synonymous with a confession of faith and does not require an overly optimistic disposition, but instead appears within diverse and often surprising circumstances. Alongside original contributions to French phenomenology and creation theology, The Play of Goodness counterbalances a tendency in continental philosophy to focus on negative phenomena. By developing the philosophical concept of a prelinguistic experience of goodness, the book identifies a quality of goodness that is integral to the place in which we find ourselves. It also articulates shared points of contact among people in an increasingly polarized world, while demonstrating that distinctly theological concepts do not need to be presented in opposition to secular, agnostic, or atheist perspectives in order to be relevant. Benjamins develops an account of creation’s goodness that has the potential to animate an abiding affection for one’s place, accentuate our reasons to care for it, and confirm that what happens in our lives is of genuine significance.
Download or read book I am an Artist He Said written by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and published by National Gallery Singapore. This book was released on with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “To be an artist is … just like shit in a clogged toilet, stubborn shit that can’t decide whether it wants to be flushed or to stick around” writes acclaimed artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook. Composed as an irreverent dialogue between masculine and feminine narrators, this book of essays is an uncategorisable fusion of art criticism, feminist theory, art pedagogy, gossip and autofiction. It is also an invaluable insider account of Southeast Asia’s contemporary artists being catapulted into international circuits since the 1990s. Araya’s provocative prose is lyrically translated from Thai for the first time by Kong Rithdee, one of Thailand’s most influential cultural critics.
Download or read book Memories of My Melancholy Whores written by Gabriel García Márquez and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN eBOOK! A New York Times Notable Book On the eve of his ninetieth birthday a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit–he has purchased hundreds of women–he asks a madam for her assistance. The fourteen-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance he has never known. Tender, knowing, and slyly comic, Memories of My Melancholy Whores is an exquisite addition to the master’s work.
Download or read book Sprigs and Twigs written by Terry-Lynn Johnson and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection is for poetry lovers – and for those who don’t yet know they love poetry. The poems can be read on a rainy day or over morning coffee. The engaging narrative and rich imagery lends itself to a tone of melancholic joy as the reader reflects on what is common to human experience Themes include nature, spiritualism, death and hope. The Collector’s Edition is a first publication of the author’s selection.
Download or read book Shelley s Textual Seductions written by Samuel Lyndon Gladden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-08 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2002. This book surveys how and to what effect Shelley uses erotic narratives to mask political rhetoric within his attempts to describe and bring forth utopia. Posing erotic relationships as both an exemplar of the inequities of power and a paradigm for alternative social orders that dismantle oppressive structures, it argues Shelley’s work imagines a space where the rigidity of tyranny succumbs to the liberation of ecstatic union. From the Romantics to the Aesthetes, it argues that this model contributed to a counter-tradition in British literature which situates the erotic as a trope for political discourse. This work will be of interest to students of literature.
Download or read book German Romantic Painting Redefined written by MitchellBenjamin Frank and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modernist aesthetic and, later, Nazi ideology split German Romantic painting into two opposed phases, an early progressive movement, represented by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) and Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810), and a later reactionary one - epitomized by Friedrich Overbeck (1789-1869) and Peter von Cornelius (1783-1867). In this rich and engaging book, Mitchell Frank explores the continuities between these two phases to reconstruct the historical position that existed in the nineteenth century and to look once again at the Nazarenes - and Overbeck in particular - as a fully integrated part of the Romantic movement. His innovative book is crucial to an understanding of German Romanticism and the legacy of this period in European art.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim written by Jeffrey C. Alexander and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-05-26 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An authoritative and comprehensive collection of essays redefining the relevance of Durkheim to the human sciences in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book From Grief to Grace written by Jeannie Ewing and published by Sophia Institute Press. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grief touches all of our lives, but it does not have to paralyze us with fear or inaction. God allows suffering because He knows how powerful it can be to our spiritual lives and to helping us fully embrace His love and mercy. In this insightful and practical book, you’ll learn how to live a life of redemptive suffering that will draw you through grief into a state of tenacity, meaning, holiness, and joy. Author Jeannie Ewing is no stranger to suffering. Her family has long struggled with bipolar disorder and depression, and her baby daughter was born with a rare genetic disorder that caused her bones to prematurely fuse together. Despite the many layers of sadness, loss, confusion, and anger, Jeannie responded to God’s calling and transformed her life into one with profound purpose and joy. Combining her training in psychology and counseling with real-life examples, Jeannie will show you that there is much life to be lived in the midst of loss, and that all things – even the most painful life experiences – are working together for a greater good. You’ll also learn: The all-too-often misunderstood difference between grief and depression.The spiritual benefits to uniting your crosses with Jesus’s Passion and Death.The counterintuitive notion that grief and joy can coexist.The spiritual danger of internalizing our pain and hiding it from othersHow great saints like St. John of the Cross and St. Therese of Liseux struggled to make sense out of suffering.The six spiritual principles that will assist you on the journey of navigating grief.How to know when you should seek professional help.Ways in which God is calling you to bring hope and joy to those dwelling in darkness.How to confidently confront the nothingness and emptiness you feel in your interior life.And Meditations on the Stations of the Cross, the Sorrowful Mysteries, and the Seven Sorrows of Mary that will help you reflect on how redemptive suffering can help you embrace God’s love and mercy.
