Melancholy Acts
Title | Melancholy Acts PDF eBook |
Author | Nouri Gana |
Publisher | Fordham Univ Press |
Pages | 227 |
Release | 2023-08-01 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1531503519 |
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.
The Melancholy of Resistance
Title | The Melancholy of Resistance PDF eBook |
Author | László Krasznahorkai |
Publisher | New Directions Publishing |
Pages | 328 |
Release | 2003 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 9780811215046 |
From the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize
Shakespearean Melancholy
Title | Shakespearean Melancholy PDF eBook |
Author | J.F. Bernard |
Publisher | Edinburgh University Press |
Pages | 252 |
Release | 2018-07-17 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1474417345 |
A new edition of the bestselling textbook for Scottish teacher training courses.
Melancholy and the Archive
Title | Melancholy and the Archive PDF eBook |
Author | Jonathan Boulter |
Publisher | A&C Black |
Pages | 322 |
Release | 2011-05-19 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1441185356 |
Melancholy and the Archive examines how trauma, history and memory are represented in key works of major contemporary writers such as David Mitchell, Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami and Jose Saramago. The book explores how these authors construct crucial relationships between sites of memory-the archive becomes a central trope here-and the self that has been subjected to various traumas, various losses. The archive-be it a bureaucratic office (Saramago), an underground bunker (Auster), a geographical space or landscape (Mitchell) or even a hole (Murakami)-becomes the means by which the self attempts to preserve and conserve his or her sense of history even as the economy of trauma threatens to erase the grounds of such preservation: as the subject or self is threatened so the archive becomes a festishized site wherein history is housed, accommodated, created, even fabricated. The archive, in Freudian terms, becomes a space of melancholy precisely as the subject preserves not only a personal history or a culture's history, but also the history of the traumas that necessitates the creation of the archive as such.
Melancholy and the Otherness of God
Title | Melancholy and the Otherness of God PDF eBook |
Author | Alina N. Feld |
Publisher | Lexington Books |
Pages | 241 |
Release | 2011-12-16 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 0739166050 |
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.
Memories and Melancholy
Title | Memories and Melancholy PDF eBook |
Author | Richard S. Scarsella |
Publisher | iUniverse |
Pages | 352 |
Release | 2005 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0595372694 |
A collection of social and cultural articles published in regional newspapers over the past decade.
Melancholy and the Secular Mind in Spanish Golden Age Literature
Title | Melancholy and the Secular Mind in Spanish Golden Age Literature PDF eBook |
Author | Teresa Scott Soufas |
Publisher | University of Missouri Press |
Pages | 224 |
Release | 1990 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780826207142 |
"Employing a broad historical perspective that forces the reevaluation of historical and literary commonplaces, Soufas artfully illuminates the complex responses of Spanish Golden Age authors to major shifts in European intellectual outlook during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century."--Publishers website.