DISCOURSES OF MELANCHOLY

International Conference organised by the Research Team
L E R M A (axe "Analyse du Discours")
On 21, 22 & 23 October 2005

CALL FOR PAPERS
Orlando looking at Jaque's reverberated image:
"Which I take to be either a fool or a cipher." ( As You Like It III.ii 279)

Melancholia posits the intersection of the biological and the symbolic,
ambivalently motivating and undermining the imaginary (viz. for example,
Kristeva's "On the melancholic imaginary "). That reverberates across
history in assessments of loss, mourning and absence. "Acedia," the radical
melancholy of the Egyptian monks of early Christianity, the "noontime demon"
of sloth, entails the temptation of demonic thoughts and the proliferation
of images, an otiose, immobilised hankering. Their chiaroscuro deserts are
the spiritual landscape of the Promethean myths of transgressive fantasies
of knowledge. The melancholy utopia of Burton, under the mask of mad
Democritus, pits the meditative individual against repressive society.
Melancholy has been either a foreboding of the tragic human condition or a
lucid self-analysis.
Historically, solipsistic melancholia may mark the elegiac transformation of
meditation as transitive upon the epic dimension of the actual world  (the
Homeric "home") to its modern, self-constitutive power as "Trauerspiel."
With Kierkegaard, "acedia" becomes "tristitia," a despair grown
self-conscious between sin and passion: the solitary misanthropists or the
scornful elect. Looking both towards medieval times and to the Renaissance,
Dürer's figure is linked to sloth and to geometry, a blasphemous picture of
the creative artist anticipating Blake and/or Romantic irony.
Both the early modern and the post-modern periods entertain a peculiarly
intimate relationship with melancholy because they are two moments of the
history of ideas when "A New Philosophy calls all in doubt." Deconstruction
is a questioning of the metaphysical value on which Western humanism has
been grounded, from the Reformation on and through the Enlightenment. A
symptom of the periodic angst and restlessness of the Western subject when
confronted with the necessity to redefine itself in the world, literary
melancholy has various avatars that come to the fore at times of existential
crisis, from Renaissance man's Faustian sprezzatura to Romantic agony,
post-modern pastiche and openness.

Papers can run the gamut of those various aspects and others, to try and
specify melancholy as against other modes of discourses.

Bibliographical Notes:
Burton, Richard. The Anatomy of Melancholy. 1621.
Kristeva, Julia. Soleil Noir. Paris : Gallimard, Folio, 1989.
Larue, Anne. L'autre mélancolie : Acedia, ou les chambres de l'esprit. Paris
: Hermann,  2001.
Masson, Jean-Yves, ed.  Faust ou la mélancolie du savoir. Paris :
Desjonquères, 2003.
Radden, Jennifer (ed). The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva.
Oxford University Press, 2002.
Starobinski, Jean. La Mélancolie au miroir. Paris : Julliard, 1997.

Organising committee:
Max DUPERRAY [log in to unmask]
Adrian HARDING [log in to unmask]
Joanny MOULIN [log in to unmask]

Secretary:
Sylvie GUITOU [log in to unmask]

Département d'anglais
Université de Provence (Aix-Marseille I)
29, avenue Robert Schnuman
F-13621 Aix-en-Provence Cedex 1
France
Voice: +33 (0)4 42 94 36 50
Fax: +33 (0)4 42 64 19 08
On-line registration form: http://www.up.univ-mrs.fr/wlerma/

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