Published in five editions between 1621 and 1651, The Anatomy of Melancholy marks a unique moment in the development of disciplines, when fields of knowledge were distinct but not yet restrictive. In ...Robert Burton’s Rhetoric , Susan Wells analyzes the Anatomy , demonstrating how its early modern practices of knowledge and persuasion can offer a model for transdisciplinary scholarship today.
In the first decades of the seventeenth century, Robert Burton attempted to gather all the existing knowledge about melancholy, drawing from professional discourses including theology, medicine, and philology as well as the emerging sciences. Examining this text through a rhetorical lens, Wells provides an account of these disciplinary exchanges in all their subtle variety and abundant wit, showing that questions of how knowledge is organized and how it is made persuasive are central to rhetorical theory. Ultimately, Wells argues that in addition to a book about melancholy, Burton’s Anatomy is a meditation on knowledge.
A fresh interpretation of The Anatomy of Melancholy , this volume will be welcomed by scholars of early modern English and the rhetorics of health and medicine, as well as those interested in transdisciplinary work and rhetorical theory.
This essay intends to circumscribe in the recent Brazilian social tradition the problem of far right-wing populism, in a resumption and repetition of what happened in the nefarious times of the ...military dictatorship. For this, we analyzed the debt established by Brazilian society towards the dead, insofar as the crimes committed by the dictatorship were not judged. In addition, this debt refers to other existing debts in Brazilian society, referring to the slavery tradition, as well as gender related patriarchal relations.
RESUME: L’intention de cet essai est de circonscrire dans la récente tradition sociale brésilienne la problématique du populisme d’extrême droite, dans une reprise et une répétition de ce qui s’est passé dans les temps néfastes de la dictature militaire. Pour cela, nous soulignerons la dette établie par la société brésilienne envers les morts, dans la mesure où les crimes perpétrés par la dictature n’ont pas été jugés. En outre, cette dette fait référence à d’autres dettes existant dans la société brésilienne, se référant à la tradition esclavagiste, ainsi qu’aux relations patriarcales dans le registre des sexes.
RESUMO. A intenção deste ensaio é circunscrever na tradição social brasileira recente a problemática do populismo de extrema direita, em uma retomada e repetição do que se passou nos tempos nefastos da ditadura militar. Para isso, vamos destacar a dívida estabelecida pela sociedade brasileira para com os mortos, na medida em que os crimes realizados pela ditadura não foram julgados. Além disso, tal dívida remete a outras dívidas existentes na sociedade brasileira, referentes à tradição escravocrata, assim como as relações patriarcais no registro do gênero.
Today, we find ourselves surrounded by numerous reasons to despair, from loneliness, suffering and death at an individual level to societal alienation, oppression, sectarian conflict and war. No ...honest assessment of life can take place without facing up to these facts and it is not surprising that more and more people are beginning to suspect that the human story will end in tragedy. However, this focus on despair does not paint a complete and accurate picture of reality, which is also inflected with beauty and goodness. Working with examples from poetry and literature, including Virginia Woolf and Jack Gilbert and the films of Terrence Malick, Melancholic Joy offers an honest assessment of the human condition. It unflinchingly acknowledges the everyday frustrations and extraordinary horrors that generate despair and argues that the appropriate response is to take up joy again, not in an attempt to ignore or dismiss evil, but rather as part of a "melancholic joy" that accepts the mystery of a world both beautiful and brutal.
This article proposes a method for studying and engaging in a Black melancholic practice of YA SFF (science fiction and fantasy) fandom. In 2015, a minor fan discourse on ‘the Black Hermione’ rose to ...public prominence when the Black actress Noma Dumezweni was cast to play Hermione Granger in J.K. Rowling’s new Harry Potter stage play. I argue that the ensuing discourse evidences a fannish desire for authorial sanction that is underrecognized in the field of fandom scholarship. Race and melancholy both inflect experiences of fandom, but fandom studies historically lacks frameworks for considering either. Rowling’s public espousal of a trans-exclusive gender politic since 2019 has made it particularly urgent to address the disappointments and unrealized desires that inform fans’ relations with cultural creators. Though obscured in Rowling’s partial embrace of the Black Hermione, I argue that this 2015 episode stands as an important first boundary case between the scope of Rowling’s imagination and fans’ desires to fit within it. Adapting Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’ framework to name a ‘manumissive black fantastic’, I explore a method for observing modes of fan engagement steeped in racial grief and, coextensively, a method for engaging in racial grief through fandom. By way of demonstration, this article concludes with a short work of original fan fiction.
Based on the theoretical and methodological indications provided by the Geneva critic and historian Jean Starobinski in his analysis of melancholic figures in the 19th century, this study focuses on ...the presence of the figure of the «Redskin» or «Savage» of North America in French anthropology of the same period. Starting from the observation of its melancholic character, the origins of this figure and its attributes will be reconstructed, and its moral and epistemological function in physical anthropology, in the emerging palaeoanthropology and in colonial ideological discourse, will be analysed. This path will be an opportunity to question the complex relationships between scientific and aesthetic languages in European modernity.
Melancholia is a commonly experienced feeling, and one with a long and fascinating medical history which can be charted back to antiquity. Avoiding the simplistic binary opposition of constructivism ...and hard realism, this book argues that melancholia was a culture-bound syndrome which thrived in the West because of the structure of Western medicine since the Ancient Greeks, and because of the West's fascination with self-consciousness. While melancholia cannot be equated with modern depression, Matthew Bell argues that concepts from recent depression research can shed light on melancholia. Within a broad historical panorama, Bell focuses on ancient medical writing, especially the little-known but pivotal Rufus of Ephesus, and on the medicine and culture of early modern Europe. Separate chapters are dedicated to issues of gender and cultural difference, and the final chapter offers a survey of melancholia in the arts, explaining the prominence of melancholia - especially in literature.
This article has no intention to deconstruct the now classical Saidian idea that Western Orientalism was a global system of misrepresentation and control of non-Western cultures, particularly in the ...nineteenth century, when the colonial expansion spread over most of the regions marked by the cultures of Islam. Instead, It intends to reflect upon the fact that during this period, the Orientalist system established itself in the broader context of a modern condition which was (and still is) felt and conceived as a general “state of crisis.” This critical dimension of modern Western culture explains both the extreme degree of violence of the Orientalist enterprise of capture and its internal criticism by its own perpetrators. The same duality characterizes the modern production of visual images: the crisis of the Western mode of mimetic representation is responsible for both the paroxysmal multiplication of images, in the nascent “society of the spectacle,” and their implosion, in the experiments of the so-called artistic avant-gardes at the beginning of the twentieth century. Some decades earlier, such a radical critique of representation had been developed at the crossroads of applied arts and architecture, in debates on the nature and function of ornaments. We know how central the reference to the arts of Islam and their aesthetics, which were conceived in opposition to the contemporary Orientalist fancies, was for these debates. How did these two positions—the critique of Orientalism and of visual representation—interact? To what extent did they reinforce each other? In order to illustrate this question, This article will conjure up a most revealing episode: Henri Matisse’s trip to Algeria in 1906 and the works that immediately followed this early “Oriental” encounter for the artist.
An introduction to three papers that focus on fatherhood. Common to each paper is an understanding that the loss of idealization in adult identity development affords working with an aftermath of ...melancholy that can alter the role of fatherhood in a pro-social direction. To that end, intersectionality, essentialism, and challenges of being Other are addressed with a focus that is simultaneously clinically and culturally attuned.
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