The Melancholy Art

The Melancholy Art PDF Author: Michael Ann Holly
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400844959
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
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 Melancholy Art

The Melancholy Art PDF Author: Michael Ann Holly
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400844959
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book

Book Description
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 Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and Culture

The Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and Culture PDF Author: Andrea Bubenik
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429887760
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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Book Description
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).

Saturn and Melancholy

Saturn and Melancholy PDF Author: Raymond Klibansky
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773559523
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 489

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Book Description
Saturn and Melancholy remains an iconic text in art history, intellectual history, and the study of culture, despite being long out of print in English. Rooted in the tradition established by Aby Warburg and the Warburg Library, this book has deeply influenced understandings of the interrelations between the humanities disciplines since its first publication in English in 1964. This new edition makes the original English text available for the first time in decades. Saturn and Melancholy offers an unparalleled inquiry into the origin and development of the philosophical and medical theories on which the ancient conception of the temperaments was based and discusses their connections to astrological and religious ideas. It also traces representations of melancholy in literature and the arts up to the sixteenth century, culminating in a landmark analysis of Dürer's most famous engraving, Melencolia I. This edition features Raymond Klibansky's additional introduction and bibliographical amendments for the German edition, as well as translations of source material and 155 original illustrations. An essay on the complex publication history of this pathbreaking project - which almost did not see the light of day - covers more than eighty years, including its more recent heritage. Making new a classic book that has been out of print for over four decades, this expanded edition presents fresh insights about Saturn and Melancholy and its legacy as a precursor to modern interdisciplinary studies.

Melancholy

Melancholy PDF Author: László F. Földényi (Foldenyi)
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300220693
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Alberto Manguel praises the Hungarian writer László Földényi as “one of the most brilliant essayists of our time.” Földényi’s extraordinary Melancholy, with its profusion of literary, ecclesiastical, artistic, and historical insights, gives proof to such praise. His book, 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. This distinguished translation brings Földényi’s work directly to English-language readers for the first time.

Double Melancholy

Double Melancholy PDF Author: C.E. Gatchalian
Publisher: arsenal pulp press
ISBN: 1551527545
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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Book Description
According to Didier Eribon, melancholy is where it all starts and where it also ends: the lifelong process of mourning that each homosexual experiences, and through which they construct their own identity. In this beguiling book, an introverted, anxious, ambitious, artistically gifted queer Filipino-Canadian boy finds solace, inspiration, and a “syllabus for living” in art—works of literature and music, from the children’s literary classic Anne of Green Gables to the music of Maria Callas. But their contribution to his intellectual, emotional, and spiritual edification belies the fact that they were largely heteronormative and white, which had the effect of invisibilizing him as a queer person of color. Part memoir, part cultural commentary, and a hybrid of besotted aesthetic appreciation and unsparing critique, Double Melancholy is by turns a passionate love letter to art and an embattled examination of its oppressive complicity with the society that produces it, and the depths to which art both enriches and colonizes us. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

The Dark Side of Genius

The Dark Side of Genius PDF Author: Laurinda S. Dixon
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271059358
Category : Melancholy in art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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.

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 Aesthetics of Disengagement

The Aesthetics of Disengagement PDF Author: Christine Ross
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816645398
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Reveals the artistic subjectivity of the scientific notion of depression.

The Melancholy of Mechagirl

The Melancholy of Mechagirl PDF Author: Catherynne M. Valente
Publisher: VIZ Media LLC
ISBN: 1421564432
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
A woman who dreams of machines. A paper lantern that falls in love. The most compelling video game you’ve never played and that nobody can ever play twice. This collection of Catherynne M. Valente’s stories and poems with Japanese themes includes the lauded novella “Silently and Very Fast,” the award-nominated “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time,” and “Ghosts of Gunkanjima”—which originally appeared in a book smaller than your palm, published in a limited edition of twenty-four. Also included are two new stories: the semiautobiographical, metafictional, and utterly magical “Ink, Water, Milk” and the cinematic, demon-haunted “Story No. 6.” -- VIZ Media

The Melancholy of Race

The Melancholy of Race PDF Author: Anne Anlin Cheng
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195151623
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
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.