Melancholy Acts
Melancholy Acts

Author: Nouri Gana

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2023-08-01

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1531503519

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How do the literatures and cultures of oppressed societies survive and flourish in spite of the overdetermining conditions of precarity and injustice of which they are a product and against which they protest? Might the symptom of oppression become simultaneously the agent of its critique? Melancholy Acts offers richly nuanced reflections on these questions through a series of wide-ranging engagements with Arab thought, literature, and film in the aftermath of the 1948 dispossession of Palestinians and the 1967 military defeat of Arab armies. Melancholy Acts offers a psychoaffective theory of cultural production that arises out of the disjunction between political impoverishment and cultural resistance to colonial and neoliberal oppression. Such a theory allows the author to trace the melancholy disposition of Arabic literary and filmic productions and to discern the precarious rhetorical modes of their critical intervention in a culture that is continually strained to its breaking point. Across six chapters, Melancholy Acts reads with rigor and sensitivity contentious topics of Arab contemporaneity such as secular modernity and manhood, Arab nationalism and leftism, literary and artistic iltizām, or commitment, Islamism, and martyrdom. The book tracks the melancholy politics that inform the literary and cultural projects of a multitude of Arab novelists (Ghassan Kanafani and Naguib Mahfouz); poets and playwrights (Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani, and Saadallah Wannous); filmmakers (Nouri Bouzid, Moufida Tlatli, Youssef Chahine, and Hany Abu Assad); alongside the work of such intellectuals as Hussein Muruwwa, Malek Bennabi, Karima Lazali, George Tarabishi, and Fethi Benslama, from within the Arab world, as well as such non-Arab thinkers as Freud, Lacan, Adorno, Fanon, Spivak, Butler, and Žižek. Melancholy Acts charts a fresh and bold new approach to Arabic and comparative literature that combines in interlaced simultaneity a high sensitivity to local idioms, as they swerve between symptom and critique, with nuanced knowledge of the geopolitics of theory and psychoanalysis.

Melancholy
Melancholy

Author: F. László Földényi

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2016-01-01

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0300167482

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"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.

The Dark Years?
The Dark Years?

Author: Jacob L. Goodson

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2020-08-04

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 1532653905

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In 1997 and 1998, the American secular philosopher Richard Rorty published a set of predictions about the twenty-first century ranging from the years 2014-95. He predicted, for instance, the election of a "strong man" in the 2016 presidential race and the proliferation of gun violence starting in 2014. He labels the years from 2014-44 the darkest years of American history, politics, and society. From 2045-95, Rorty thinks his own vision for "social hope" will be implemented within American society--a vision that includes charity (in the Pauline sense), solidarity, and sympathy. Rorty considers himself a leftist, liberal, and a philosopher of hope. So why would a philosopher of hope predict such darkness and despair? In The Dark Years? Philosophy, Politics, and the Problem of Predictions philosopher and political theorist Jacob L. Goodson explains the fullness of Rorty's predictions, the problem of making predictions within the social sciences, and the reasons why even Rorty's vision for life after the "dark years" fails us on the standards of hope. Goodson argues that we ought to challenge the monopoly that American politics has as our object of hope. Goodson makes the case for a melancholic yet redemptive hope.

John Brown's Body
John Brown's Body

Author: Jean Elizabeth, Poet Laureate Ward

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2008-08-02

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1435746597

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JOHN BROWN (1800-1859) John Brown was an American abolitionist, born in Connecticut and raised in Ohio. He felt passionately and violently that he must personally fight to end slavery. In 1856, in retaliation for the sack of Lawrence, he led the murder of five proslavery men on the banks of the Pottawatomie River. He stated that he was an instrument in the hand of God. Brown did not end there. On Oct. 16, 1859, Brown and 21 followers captured the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Brown planned the takeover as the first step in his liberation of the slaves, but it was taken the next morning by Robert E. Lee. Brown was hanged on Dec. 2, 1859. He became a martyr for many because of the dignity and sincerity that he displayed during his popular trial. Benet wrote "John Brown's Body," an epic about the Civil War. He framed his poem around the life and death of John Brown.