Browsing by Subject "Melancholy"
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Item Between us an invisible column(2014-05) LaDeau, Philip Ross; Williams, Jeff, M.F.A.This report chronicles the processes and influences relevant to my work as it has developed over the past three years. I examine how our human separateness and new technologies have effected myself and the work I create, ultimately exploring how technology has aggravated this separation rather than mitigate it. I explain my appropriation of digital, repetitious, and machine-like processes in order to recreate this separation, primarily in the form of drawings, sculptures, and photographs.Item Dejection as revealed in the great romantics(Texas Tech University, 1951-05) Dobson, Elva LoveNot availableItem Lothar Osterburg’s Imagining New York: a melancholic picturing of the past(2014-05) Balboni, Francesca Jean; Reynolds, Ann MorrisHow do we engage with old photographs or with images that appear to be “old?” Moreover, how do we relate to the past through such images? These are questions I explore through a series of photographs created between 2007 and 2013 by master printmaker, Lothar Osterburg (German, b. 1961). For Imagining New York, Osterburg worked purely from memory, building models of the city from found and everyday materials and composing them through the frame of a fixed camera lens. As his look through the lens suggests, Osterburg’s New York stems, perhaps primarily, from memories of images. His final images, printed as photogravures, may create a similarly memory-fueled experience for the viewer. These images may look and feel quite familiar, but they resist easy identification; the strange artificiality and generic nature of the model may bring to mind any number of associations—real and fictional—spanning the turn of the twentieth century, each slipping into the next. Thinking Imagining New York through Sigmund Freud’s potentially productive melancholia, and Walter Benjamin’s melancholic “historical materialism,” I suggest that the ambivalence of Osterburg’s images—their particular fixation on the past—invites a mode of viewing that produces a certain distance, a critical remove not only from habitual viewing practices, but also from the viewer’s own relation to the past. But how is this melancholic movement productive today? Osterburg’s images may point to a collective experience in seemingly personal “historical processes” of reflection; emphasizing the status of the past in the imagination as image, it may become something that—together—we actively access and construct to inform the present. And through the critical distance they prompt, these images suggest “work” that is productive in acknowledging, specifically, the misrecognition of the social. During this process of prolonged disjuncture of temporality and space, the viewer quite literally “sees” these images differently. Or rather she may “see” herself seeing them, to become aware of her active role as viewer, as an active presence in the present. And in turn, it may be that the past—a kind of cultural experience—becomes an active, present social formation.Item The Measure of Love Lost: Jeanette Winterson's "Written on the Body" and the Discourses of Love, Melancholy, and Disease(2010-10-12) Wheeler, Stephanie K.Jeanette Winterson?s novel Written on the Body asks what it means to express love not through language but through the body, where it is felt, challenging the boundaries placed between body and language. Using Winterson?s novel and Roland Barthes?s A Lover?s Discourse as points of inquiry, this thesis examines conceptions of love based on heteronormative and romanticized visions of present and healthy bodies. This thesis asks how a body that is diseased and dying can express an emotion that is predicated on these very notions of presence, absence, and health. The narrator of the novel sees love as a scripted story that, once adhered to, determines the (successful) experience of love. Louise?s cancer threatens these scripts of love, as it destroys the narrator?s conception of both love and Louise. Despite the fact that Louise is absent and dying, the narrator begins to write a new story that will allow him/her to have a perfect relationship with Louise, so that s/he can reconcile the contradictions of the scripts that the relationship exposed. Using Slavoj Zizek?s ?Melancholy and the Act? and Richard Stamelman?s Lost Beyond Telling as frameworks of mourning and melancholy, the narrator?s melancholy over a lost presence thus emerges as a way that allows him/her to create a perfect love story. To make Louise appear perfect in this perfect love story, the narrator manipulates the language of disease that reconstructs Louise's physical absence as a textual presence. The discourse surrounding Louise thus begins to operate out of the desire to compensate and supplement what is missing; in Louise's case, the narrator is supplementing her with a "normal," healthy body. Looking in the shadows of the narrator?s memories, Written on the Body emerges as not only an account of the narrator?s love story, but also an account of Louise?s story, a story of a body that refuses to be written on and demands to be heard. Winterson demonstrates how the body is always in the process of creating knowledge and meaning that can only be obtained by questioning what is normal, both for the body and for the scripts we all adhere to.