The book consists of nine chapters devoted to representations of melancholia in 19th-century art and literature. The book not only provides a survey of images and modes of behaviour of 19th-century individuals, but also discusses the meanings of melancholia as they appeared in European culture over time.
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.
Examines "melancholia" as a philosophical, medical, and social phenomenon in early modern art. Argues that, despite advances in art and science, the topos of the dispirited intellectual continues to function metaphorically as a locus for society's fears and tensions.
This book explores the history and continuing relevance of melancholia as an amorphous but richly suggestive theme in literature, music, and visual culture, as well as philosophy and the history of ideas. Inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (1514)—the first visual representation of artistic melancholy—this volume brings together contributions by scholars from a variety of disciplines. Topics include: Melencolia I and its reception; how melancholia inhabits landscapes, soundscapes, figures and objects; melancholia in medical and psychological contexts; how melancholia both enables and troubles artistic creation; and Sigmund Freud’s essay "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917).
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.
The School of Days establishes Heinrich von Kleist as a strong voice within the pedagogical debates of his times. Through detailed analyses of works by Rousseau, Jean Paul Richter, Kant, and others, it traces Kleist's response to influential pedagogical theories of the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nancy Nobile examines the relationship of theory and practice in education to illuminate the novelistic impulse, and thus the role of fiction, in pedagogical endeavors. Nobile demonstrates how Kleist's texts reveal the irrationality and antagonism often inherent in the ostensibly rational act of shaping human beings. She explores the dynamics of trauma in Kleist's depictions of education, arguing that his works frequently stage pedagogical encounters as violent negotiations of gender. Beginning with her argument that trauma is a constitutive element of education in Rousseau's Emile, Nobile explores the role of trauma in both subject formation and the perception of national identity, and considers its ramifications for Kleist's biography, for his fictional characters, and also for the prospect of German nationhood during the Napoleonic wars. The School of Days provides close readings of works in all genres by Kleist: drama, essay, correspondence, narrative, and lyric. It offers new interpretations of several of Kleist's most familiar works -- "Uber das Marionettentheater, " "Uber die allmahliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden, " Prinz Friedrich von Homburg -- and also contains detailed commentary on texts usually ignored by Kleistian scholarship: "Allemeuester Erziehungsplan, " "Charite-Vorfall, " and other essays written for the Germania, Phobus, and the BerlinerAbendblatter. While Nobile devotes careful attention to textual detail, she firmly anchors her readings within the political, historical, biographical, and philosophical contexts of Kleist's works. This book will be of interest to scholars of Heinrich von Kleist and German Romanticism as well as those interested in the history of pedagogy.
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.
Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts is the first book-length study that examines Celan’s impact on visual culture. Exploring poetry’s relation to film, painting and architecture, this study tracks the transformation of Celan in postwar German culture and shows the extent to which his poetics accompany the country’s memory politics after the Holocaust. The book posits a new theoretical model of the Holocaustal uncanny – evolving out of a crossing between Celan, Freud, Heidegger and Levinas – that provides a map for entering other modes of Holocaust representations. After probing Celan’s critique of the uncanny in Heidegger, this study shifts to the translation of Celan’s uncanny poetics in Resnais’ film Night and Fog, Kiefer’s art and Libeskind’s architecture.
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) has emerged as one of the leading cultural critics of the twentieth century. His work encompasses aesthetics, metaphysical language and narrative theories, German literary history, philosophies of history, the intersection of Marxism and Messianic thought, urban topography, and the development of photography and film. Benjamin defined the task of the critic as one that blasts endangered moments of the past out of the continuum of history so that they attain new significance. This volume of new essays employs this principle of actualization as its methodological program in offering a new advanced introduction to Benjamin's own work. The essays analyze Benjamin's central texts, themes, terminologies, and genres in their original contexts while simultaneously situating them in new parameters, such as contemporary media, memory culture, constructions of gender, postcoloniality, and theories of urban topographies. The Companion brings together an international group of established and emerging scholars to explicate Benjamin's actuality from a multidisciplinary perspective. Designed for audiences interested in literary criticism, cultural studies, and neighboring disciplines, the volume serves as a stimulus for new debates about Benjamin's intellectual legacy today. Contributors: Wolfgang Bock, Willi Bolle, Dianne Chisholm, Adrian Daub, Dominik Finkelde, Eric Jarosinski, Lutz Koepnick, Vivian Liska, Karl Ivan Solibakke, Marc de Wilde, Bernd Witte Rolf J. Goebel is Distinguished Professor of German and Chair of the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
This text focuses on the relevance of the proper name in the conceptions of language and history that inform the thought of Adorno, Benjamin, Heidegger and Rosenzweig. Their interest in the proper name is because it does not simply operate as a conventional linguistic sign. A specific experience of the Jewish religious tradition (Adorno, Benjamin, Rosenzweig) and a vision of poetry resulting from the reading of Hoelderlin (Heidegger) lead to the idea of an absolute singularity, it is a singularity that resists all conceptual identificaiton and the proper name expresses this singularity in language. In this analysis, history is conceived as a movement that both betrays and tends towards the absolute singularity that manifests itself in the unsayable, i.e. in the name of God, or in poetical language. questions of gesture, translation and melancholia and the moment of apparition in the work of art are comprehensible within Dr Duttmann's discussion, which should be of interest to students of language, philosophy and theology.