Allegory and the Work of Melancholy

Allegory and the Work of Melancholy PDF Author: Jeremy Tambling
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004490795
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Written using critical theory, especially by Walter Benjamin, Blanchot and Derrida, Allegory and the Work of Melancholy: The Late Medieval and Shakespeare reads medieval and early modern texts, exploring allegory within texts, allegorical readings of texts, and melancholy in texts. Authors studied are Langland and Chaucer, Hoccleve, on his madness, Lydgate and Henryson. Shakespeare's first tetralogy, the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III conclude this investigation of death, mourning, madness and of complaint. Benjamin's writings on allegory inspire this linking, which also considers Dürer, Baldung and Holbein and the dance of the dead motifs. The study sees subjectivity created as obsessional, paranoid, and links melancholia, madness and allegorical creation, where parts of the subject are split off from each other, and speak as wholes. Allegory and melancholy are two modes – a state of writing and a state of being - where the subject fragments or disappears. These texts are aware of the power of death within writing, which makes them, fascinating. The book will appeal to readers of literature from the medieval to the Baroque, and to those interested in critical theory, and histories of visual culture.

Allegory and the Work of Melancholy

Allegory and the Work of Melancholy PDF Author: Jeremy Tambling
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004490795
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Written using critical theory, especially by Walter Benjamin, Blanchot and Derrida, Allegory and the Work of Melancholy: The Late Medieval and Shakespeare reads medieval and early modern texts, exploring allegory within texts, allegorical readings of texts, and melancholy in texts. Authors studied are Langland and Chaucer, Hoccleve, on his madness, Lydgate and Henryson. Shakespeare's first tetralogy, the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III conclude this investigation of death, mourning, madness and of complaint. Benjamin's writings on allegory inspire this linking, which also considers Dürer, Baldung and Holbein and the dance of the dead motifs. The study sees subjectivity created as obsessional, paranoid, and links melancholia, madness and allegorical creation, where parts of the subject are split off from each other, and speak as wholes. Allegory and melancholy are two modes – a state of writing and a state of being - where the subject fragments or disappears. These texts are aware of the power of death within writing, which makes them, fascinating. The book will appeal to readers of literature from the medieval to the Baroque, and to those interested in critical theory, and histories of visual culture.

Lost Beyond Telling

Lost Beyond Telling PDF Author: Richard Howard Stamelman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801424083
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
In seeking to give voice to absent things or lost experiences, Richard Stamelman says, modern poetry attempts to give absence a shape. Loss, in his view, is both the cause and the subject of the modern poem. Fittingly, in Lost beyond Telling he formulates and develops what he calls a poetics of loss, with which he frames his treatment of modern French poetry.

Allegory and Ideology

Allegory and Ideology PDF Author: Fredric Jameson
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788730453
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Fredric Jameson takes on the allegorical form Works do not have meanings, they soak up meanings: a work is a machine for libidinal investments (including the political kind). It is a process that sorts incommensurabilities and registers contradictions (which is not the same as solving them!) The inevitable and welcome conflict of interpretations - a discursive, ideological struggle - therefore needs to be supplemented by an account of this simultaneous processing of multiple meanings, rather than an abandonment to liberal pluralisms and tolerant (or intolerant) relativisms. This is not a book about "method", but it does propose a dialectic capable of holding together in one breath the heterogeneities that reflect our biological individualities, our submersion in collective history and class struggle, and our alienation to a disembodied new world of information and abstraction. Eschewing the arid secularities of philosophy, Walter Benjamin once recommended the alternative of the rich figurality of an older theology; in that spirit we here return to the antiquated Ptolemaic systems of ancient allegory and its multiple levels (a proposal first sketched out in The Political Unconscious); it is tested against the epic complexities of the overtly allegorical works of Dante, Spenser and the Goethe of Faust II, as well as symphonic form in music, and the structure of the novel, postmodern as well as Third-World: about which a notorious essay on National Allegory is here reprinted with a theoretical commentary; and an allegorical history of emotion is meanwhile rehearsed from its contemporary, geopolitical context.

Leaves of Mourning

Leaves of Mourning PDF Author: Anselm Haverkamp
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791427392
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Examines allegory in Hölderlin's later work, exploring subjects such as Freud and Derrida's views of mourning, and offering original readings of works including Impossible Ode, Mnemosyne, and The Churchyard .

Philosophy and Melancholy

Philosophy and Melancholy PDF Author: Ilit Ferber
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080478664X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
This book traces the concept of melancholy in Walter Benjamin's early writings. Rather than focusing on the overtly melancholic subject matter of Benjamin's work or the unhappy circumstances of his own fate, Ferber considers the concept's implications for his philosophy. Informed by Heidegger's discussion of moods and their importance for philosophical thought, she contends that a melancholic mood is the organizing principle or structure of Benjamin's early metaphysics and ontology. Her novel analysis of Benjamin's arguments about theater and language features a discussion of the Trauerspiel book that is amongst the first in English to scrutinize the baroque plays themselves. Philosophy and Melancholy also contributes to the history of philosophy by establishing a strong relationship between Benjamin and other philosophers, including Leibniz, Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger.

Against Happiness

Against Happiness PDF Author: Eric G. Wilson
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429944218
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
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.

The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan

The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan PDF Author: Michael Davies
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191649457
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 806

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan is the most extensive volume of original essays ever published on the seventeenth-century Nonconformist preacher and writer, John Bunyan. Its thirty-eight chapters examine Bunyan's life and works, their religious and historical contexts, and the critical reception of his writings, in particular his allegorical narrative, The Pilgrim's Progress. Interdisciplinary and comprehensive, it provides unparalleled scope and expertise, ranging from literary theory to religious history and from theology to post-colonial criticism. The Handbook is structured in four sections. The first, 'Contexts', deals with the historical Bunyan in relation to various aspects of his life, background, and work as a Nonconformist: from basic facts of biography to the nature of his church at Bedford, his theology, and the religious and political cultures of seventeenth-century Dissent. Part 2 considers Bunyan's literary output: from his earliest printed tracts to his posthumously published works. Offering discrete chapters on Bunyan's major works--Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), The Pilgrim's Progress, Parts I and II (1678; 1684); The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), and The Holy War (1682)--this section nevertheless covers Bunyan's oeuvre in its entirety: controversial and pastoral, narrative and poetic. Section 3, 'Directions in Criticism', engages with Bunyan in literary critical terms, focusing on his employment of form and language and on theoretical approaches to his writings: from psychoanalytic to post-secular criticism. Section 4, 'Journeys', tackles some of the ways in which Bunyan's works, and especially The Pilgrim's Progress, have travelled throughout the world since the late seventeenth century, assessing Bunyan's place within key literary periods and their distinctive developments: from the eighteenth-century novel to the writing of 'empire.'

John Donne and Baroque Allegory

John Donne and Baroque Allegory PDF Author: Hugh Grady
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107195802
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Provides a new appreciation of John Donne through the lens of Walter Benjamin's critical theory of baroque allegory.

Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-first Century

Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-first Century PDF Author: Rui Manuel G. de Carvalho Homem
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042017214
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Most of the contributions to Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-First Century evolve from a practical commitment to the translation of Shakespearean drama and at the same time reveal a sophisticated awareness of recent developments in literary criticism, Shakespeare studies, and the relatively new field of Translation studies. All the essays are sensitive to the criticism to which notions of the original as well as distinctions between the creative and the derivative have been subjected in recent years. Consequently, they endeavour to retrieve translation from its otherwise subordinate status, and advance it as a model for all writing, which is construed, inevitably, as a rewriting. This volume offers a wide range of responses to the theme of Shakespeare and translation as well as Shakespeare in translation. Diversity is ensured both by the authors' varied academic and cultural backgrounds, and by the different critical standpoints from which they approach their themes - from semiotics to theatre studies, and from gender studies to readings firmly rooted in the practice of translation. Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-First Century is divided into two complementary sections. The first part deals with the broader insights to be gained from a multilingual and multicultural framework. The second part focuses on Shakespearean translation into the specific language and the culture of Portugal.

Walter Benjamin and the Actuality of Critique

Walter Benjamin and the Actuality of Critique PDF Author: Carlo Salzani
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527573168
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
The striking actuality of Walter Benjamin’s work does not rest on a supposed “usefulness” of his philosophy for current concerns, but rather on the high “legibility” to which his oeuvre has come in the present. Indeed, this legibility is a function of critique, which unearths the truth-content of a work in a constellation of reading with the present, and assures thereby that the work lives on. Following this methodological tenet, this book approaches Benjamin’s work with two foci: the actuality of his critique of violence, a central and unavoidable topic in the contemporary political-philosophical debate, and the actuality of his critique of experience, which perhaps is not as conspicuous as that of his critique of violence but constitutes, nonetheless, the bedrock upon which his whole philosophy rests.