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This book explores the intersection between medicine and literature in medieval Iberian literature and culture. Its overarching argument is that thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iberian authors revalorized the interconnection between the body, the mind, and the soul in light of the evolving epistemology of medicine. Prior to the reintroduction of classical medical treatises through Arab authors into European cultures, mental disorders and bodily diseases were primarily attributed to moral corruption, demonic influence, and superstition. The introduction of novel regimens of health as well as treatises on melancholia into academic institutions and into the cultural landscape provided the tools for newly minted authors to understand that psychosomatic illnesses stemmed from malfunctions of the body's biochemical composition. This book demonstrates that the earliest books written in the Iberian vernaculars contain the seeds that effect the shift from a theocentric worldview to a humanistic one. The volume features close readings of multiple texts, including medical treatises and religious writings, and King Alfonso X's Cantigas de Santa Maria, Juan Manuel's Conde Lucanor, and Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor. Even though these texts differ in literary genre, rhetorical strategy, and even purpose, this study argues that they collectively employ humoral pathology and melancholic discourses as a means of underscoring the frailty and transience of human life by showing how somatic conditions sicken the body, mind, and soul unto death.
In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation critic David L. Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han draw on case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore the social and psychic predicaments of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y. Combining critical race theory with several strands of psychoanalytic thought, they develop the concepts of racial melancholia and racial dissociation to investigate changing processes of loss associated with immigration, displacement, diaspora, and assimilation. These case studies of first- and second-generation Asian Americans deal with a range of difficulties, from depression, suicide, and the politics of coming out to broader issues of the model minority stereotype, transnational adoption, parachute children, colorblind discourses in the United States, and the rise of Asia under globalization. Throughout, Eng and Han link psychoanalysis to larger structural and historical phenomena, illuminating how the study of psychic processes of individuals can inform investigations of race, sexuality, and immigration while creating a more sustained conversation about the social lives of Asian Americans and Asians in the diaspora.
Reveals the artistic subjectivity of the scientific notion of depression.
This collection analyzes philosophical, psycho-analytic and aesthetic contexts of the discourse of melancholia in British and postcolonial literature and culture and seeks to trace the multi-faceted phenomenon of melancholia from the early modern period to the present. Texts discussed range from Shakespeare and Milton to Coetzee and Barker.
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.
This book explores the intersection between medicine and literature in medieval Iberian literature and culture. Its overarching argument is that thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iberian authors revalorized the interconnection between the body, the mind, and the soul in light of the evolving epistemology of medicine. Prior to the reintroduction of classical medical treatises through Arab authors into European cultures, mental disorders and bodily diseases were primarily attributed to moral corruption, demonic influence, and superstition. The introduction of novel regimens of health as well as treatises on melancholia into academic institutions and into the cultural landscape provided the tools for newly minted authors to understand that psychosomatic illnesses stemmed from malfunctions of the body's biochemical composition. This book demonstrates that the earliest books written in the Iberian vernaculars contain the seeds that effect the shift from a theocentric worldview to a humanistic one. The volume features close readings of multiple texts, including medical treatises and religious writings, and King Alfonso X's Cantigas de Santa Maria, Juan Manuel's Conde Lucanor, and Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor. Even though these texts differ in literary genre, rhetorical strategy, and even purpose, this study argues that they collectively employ humoral pathology and melancholic discourses as a means of underscoring the frailty and transience of human life by showing how somatic conditions sicken the body, mind, and soul unto death.
Melancholia is a commonly experienced feeling, and one with a long and fascinating medical history which can be charted back to antiquity. Avoiding the simplistic binary opposition of constructivism and hard realism, this book argues that melancholia was a culture-bound syndrome which thrived in the West because of the structure of Western medicine since the Ancient Greeks, and because of the West's fascination with self-consciousness. While melancholia cannot be equated with modern depression, Matthew Bell argues that concepts from recent depression research can shed light on melancholia. Within a broad historical panorama, Bell focuses on ancient medical writing, especially the little-known but pivotal Rufus of Ephesus, and on the medicine and culture of early modern Europe. Separate chapters are dedicated to issues of gender and cultural difference, and the final chapter offers a survey of melancholia in the arts, explaining the prominence of melancholia - especially in literature.
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.
A deft reinterpretation of the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon as a therapeutic artifact. Albrecht Dürer's famous portrayal of creative effort in paralysis, the unsurpassed masterpiece of copperplate engraving titled Melencolia I, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about the melancholic temperament, a dense allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences and the impossibility of attaining perfection. Dubbed the “image of images” for being the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon, Melencolia I also presides over the origins of modern iconology, art history's own science of meaning. Yet we are left with a clutter of mutually contradictory theories, a historiographic ruin that confirms the mood of its object. In Perfection's Therapy, Mitchell Merback reopens the case file and argues for a hidden intentionality in Melencolia's opacity, its structural “chaos,” and its resistance to allegorical closure. That intentionality, he argues, points toward a fascinating possibility never before considered: that Dürer's masterpiece is not only an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative instrument for its undoing. Merback deftly resituates Dürer's image within the long history of the therapeutic artifact. Placing Dürer's therapeutic project in dialogue with that of humanism's founder, Francesco Petrarch, Merback also unearths Dürer's ambition to act as a physician of the soul. Celebrated as the "Apelles of the black line" in his own day, and ever since as Germany's first Renaissance painter-theorist, the Dürer we encounter here is also the first modern Christian artist, addressing himself to the distress of souls, including his own. Melencolia thus emerges as a key reference point in a venture of spiritual-ethical therapy, a work designed to exercise the mind, restore the body's equilibrium, and help in getting on with the undertaking of perfection.
What can philosophy teach us about cinema? Can cinema transform how we understand philosophy? How should we describe the competing approaches to philosophizing on film? New Philosophies of Film answers these questions by offering a lucid introduction to the exciting developments and contentious debates within the philosophy of film. Mapping out the conceptual terrain, it examines both analytic and continental approaches to cinema and puts forward a pluralist film philosophy, grounded in practical examples from film, documentaries and television series. Now thoroughly updated to showcase the most recent developments in the field, this 2nd edition features: · New chapters on phenomenology, cinematic ethics, philosophical documentary film and television as philosophy, incorporating feminist, socio-political, ethical and ecological approaches to cinema · Contemporary case studies including Carol, Roma, Melancholia, two Derrida documentaries, and the Netflix series Black Mirror · Expanded coverage of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, two of the most influential philosophers of film · An updated bibliography, filmography and reading lists, with links to online resources to support further study Demonstrating how the film-philosophy encounter can open up new paths for thinking, New Philosophies of Film is an essential resource for putting interdisciplinary inquiry into practice.