Barry Curtis and Patrick Wright
Though recognized as a medical condition through much of the twentieth century, ‘Melancholia’ now stands abandoned to the cultural imagination – which is, perhaps, where this enigmatic ‘humour of the night’ has always belonged.
This course will approach melancholy not as an archaic mood disorder, but as a distinctive mode of thought, which is rich in critical potential and remains associated with political dissent as well as with ideas of creativity and romantic individuality.
1. Melancholia and the Shadow of Night
This session will be concerned with two ‘classic’ statements of the condition: 1) the melancholic lute songs of John Dowland, along with other Elizabethan poets sometimes described as belonging to the ‘school of night’ (e.g. Spenser and Shakespeare); 2) Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (ca. 1514), which will be discussed in connection with the remarkable range of reinterpretations it continues to provoke, including those of Walter Benjamin, Jean Paul Sartre and the composer Harrison Birtwistle.
Reading
Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London: Nelson, 1964) - extracts.
Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Melancholy Angel’ in The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 104-15.
2. ‘Digging for Victory’ – Ruination and Repair
Proceeding from Freud’s 1917 text ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, this session will consider the memorialisation of war and trauma, visiting the iconography of ruins and its role in melancholic creativity. We will invoke the ‘Ozymandias Complex’ (Christopher Woodward’s term) and Ruskin’s distinction between ‘noble’ and ‘heartless’ picturesque, while also investigating Gothic and ‘Goth’ articulations of the theme.
Reading
Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ [1917]
Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: 400 Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin (London: Fourth Estate), chapter 3, ‘The Strength of Backward Looking Thoughts’.
3. ‘This Melancholy London.’
Taking Patrick Keiller’s film London as its main text, this session will explore how melancholy may be used as a means of defamiliarization in recent approaches to the city. We will consider how a persistent idea of melancholy may shape present perspectives on place and historicity, and also inform a contemporary choice between imperialist nostalgia and an embrace of ‘multiculture’.
Reading
Patrick Keiller, London (BFI/Channel Four, 1994) Extracts at http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/497617/index.html
Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004).
4. Melancholy and Transcendence
This session will explore the melancholy implicit in the simulation of human life - the reactivation of dead matter, mythic forms of superhumanity and intelligent machines, and consider the attribution of depression as a characteristic of the inwardly turned role of the intellectual.
Reading
Eric G. Wilson, The Melancholy Android: On the Psychology of Sacred Machines (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 2006).
Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 2004).
5. Descent: Orpheus in London
This session will look at the idea of ‘descent’ as it featured in the more or less Modernist imagination of early twentieth century London. It will refer to the discovery of the underworld and labyrinth as a way of escaping or overthrowing the prevailing rationality of the modern condition – using the work of Ezra Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams and others. We may also consider Aleister Crowley’s claimed reconfiguration of the world’s ancient religions, achieved partly with the help of the British Museum.
Reading
William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell: Improvisations (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1957).
Harrison Birtwhistle, The Fields of Sorrow.
6. Been Down So Long….It Looks Like Up to Me
This session will explore the cultural and economic dimensions of the idea of Depression/Recession. We will explore the redemptive powers of ‘show business’ celebrity and conspicuous consumption in the light of Winnicott’s notion of the ‘manic defence’ and Richard Dyer on ‘entertainment and utopia’. Familiar arguments about the role of the mass media (Kracauer and Benjamin) will be revisited in a consideration of ‘Depression media’ – particularly musicals, public spectacle and the elaboration of ideal environments. We will look at the phenomenon of ‘emergence’ from recession, the staging of public exhilaration through case studies such as the Festival of Britain, the Millennium Dome, the 2012 Olympics, and the current political/architectural discourse of ‘Regeneration’.
Reading
Richard Dyer: ‘Entertainment and Utopia’ essay in Genre: The Musical, ed. R.Altman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).
Richard Rogers on the ‘Convivial City’ http://www.london.gov.uk/thelondonplan/
Further Reading (in roughly the order the references appear in the weekly sessions)
[A digest of these sources will be available as a photocopied dossier.]
Jackie Bowring, A Field Guide to Melancholy (Harpenden: Oldcastle, 2008).
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 2003).
Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London: Nelson, 1964).
Margot and Rudolf Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists (New York: New York Review Books, 2007)
Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Robert Baldick (1938; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000)
Günter Grass, From the Diary of a Snail, trans. Ralph Mannheim (1972; London: Vintage, 2000)
Marie-Claire Blais, Dürer’s Angel (Les Apparences), trans. David Lobdell (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1976)
W.G. Sebald Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (1998; London: Vintage, 2002)
Rachel Falconer: Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives Since 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005)
Jason Beard and Damien Hirst, eds. The Death of God: Towards a Better Understanding of a Life Without God Aboard the Ship of Fools (London: Other Criteria, 2006)
Jennifer Radden ed., The Nature of Melancholy from Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Sarah Kember, Virtual Anxiety: Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998)
Eric G. Wilson, The Melancholy Android: On the Psychology of Sacred Machines (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006)
Hal Foster: Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2004)
Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground: An essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2008), chapter 7, ‘The Underground and the Quest for Security’
Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917).
Patrick Keillor, London (BFI and Channel Four, 1994) and Robinson in Space (BBC Films/BFI, 1997).
Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004).
Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: 400 Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin (London: Fourth Estate), chapter 3, ‘The Strength of Backward Looking Thoughts’
Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (London: Vintage, 2003)
Christophe Grunenberg, ed. Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth-Century Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp.174-160 and Patrick McGrath, ‘Transgression and Decay’
James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000)
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp.138-46
Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)
Richard Dyer: ‘Entertainment and Utopia’, in Genre: The Musical ed. R.Altman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981)
Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)
Ken Worpole, Here Comes the Sun (London: Reaktion, 2000)
D.W. Winnicott, The Manic Defence (1935).
Richard Rogers on the ‘Convivial City’ http://www.london.gov.uk/thelondonplan/
Neil Spiller, Visionary Architecture: Blueprints of the Modern Imagination (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007)
The Theology of Regeneration http://www.ccel.org/s/schaff/encyc/encyc09/htm/iv.vii.cxii.htm
Texts on the Olympics and the regeneration of East London (Iain Sinclair, Patrick Wright)
