Category: Orals

Mourning and Melancholia by Sigmund Freud

Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia distinguishes between the two on the basis of self-knowledge. Melancholia is related to an “object loss which is lost from consciousness”– the melancholic might know rationally what they have lost, but not what specifically was lost to them. In mourning, there is “nothing about the loss which is unconscious” (245). In… Continue reading Mourning and Melancholia by Sigmund Freud

The Melancholy Assemblage by Drew Daniel

In The Melancholy Assemblage, Drew Daniel claims that melancholy in the early modern period constitutes an epistemological-affective assemblage, a collection of factors that is always plural; it emerges in individuals and yet is also a “social and material assemblage of bodies being together” (15). In being both interior and exterior, melancholy can be recognized but… Continue reading The Melancholy Assemblage by Drew Daniel

Image on the Edge by Michael Camille

I am returning to Michael Camille’s work after some time, and reading the entirety of Image on the Edge for the first time. Camille’s central argument is fairly simple: that margins and their relationship to central images in medieval illuminated manuscripts are the site of an engagement between societal margins and centers. In other words,… Continue reading Image on the Edge by Michael Camille

Amy Hollywood, Acute Melancholia

Amy Hollywood’s collection of essays is about the experiences of medieval mystics and other religious women, and modern attempts to reckon with and define their experiences. As she mentions in the first section of the introduction, she is interested in determining “what it might mean to say that the Virgin is real– actual, present, palpable–… Continue reading Amy Hollywood, Acute Melancholia

Lydgate, “The Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Mary”

This poem appears in a volume titled “The Minor Poems of John Lydgate”, and it is indeed minor (about 12 pages). I know next to nothing about Lydgate, but learned that he was a prodigious poet and friends with Chaucer’s son, Thomas. I’m reading Book of the Duchess in a few months and think I… Continue reading Lydgate, “The Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Mary”

Discorrelated Images by Shane Denson

This book was my first (purposeful) departure into cinema studies since reading Lynda Nead in undergrad. It is also a book about new media (useful for my other work as a freelancer writing about new media), and about the affective and aesthetic potential of invisibilized technology. Its central focus is how the move from cinema… Continue reading Discorrelated Images by Shane Denson