Melancholia as a Central European Discourse in English Literary and Cultural History

An International Conference at the University of Augsburg, 25-28th June 2009
Organizers: Prof. Dr. Martin Middeke and Dr. Christina Wald

Why are all outstanding philosophers, politicians, writers, and artists melancholic?

As the above-quoted passage – which had been ascribed to Aristotle for a long time – shows, melancholia was regarded more than an illness already in ancient times. In 350 B.C., it is understood as an epiphenomenon of, or even as a prerequisite for, outstanding cultural and political achievements and deep philosophical insight. In its age-old history, melancholia has maintained such complex denotation. While medical and psychological discourses tried to examine and define the phenomenon in terms of pathology, melancholia, at the same time, served as a versatile cultural trope. Concerning the history of medicine, melancholia developed from the ancient and early modern definition based on humour theory regarding melancholia as a surplus of bile, via Emil Kraepelin’s studies on dementia praecox (later: schizophrenia) and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical definition of melancholia as repressed grief to today’s category of depression.
The European cultural history of melancholia, however, also covers its nobilitation as a state which opens up an avenue to deeper insight and judiciousness, emblematically captured in Alfred Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I. In this context, melancholia has been linked to discourses of genius in German and English Romanticism, and, recently, has been associated with the postcolonial heritage of European imperialism in studies like Anne Anlin Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race (2000) and Paul Gilroy’s After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2004) as well as Postcolonial Melancholia (2005).
In view of recent discourses centring on melancholia, the relation between melancholia and postmodernism is much-disputed: Is a postmodern relishing in difference and playfulness tantamount to an end of (modernist?) melancholia, or is the present ‘popularity’ of melancholia an indicator for the return of emotion and, quite literally, postmodernism upon the wane?
Besides psychological, social, postcolonial, and aesthetic phenomena, melancholia also shapes discourses on the much-debated relation between sex and sexuality in western societies. Melancholia has most often been understood as an inherently masculine phenomenon – as far as it was connoted positively. Therefore, melancholia is of interest for Gender Studies in two respects: first, as a historic phenomenon that grants insight into the differentiation and hierarchy of the sexes, and second, as an analytical category derived from psychoanalysis, through which the establishment and maintenance of gender identity can be comprehended. Melancholia has recently advanced to an important concept in poststructuralist Gender and Queer Studies. When, for example, Judith Butler conceptualizes the body as a product of a melancholic incorporation, she pleads for a radically new interpretation of ‘melancholic anatomy’ about four hundred years after Robert Burton’s epoch-making Anatomy of Melancholia.
The conference, which interlinks with the central concern of the newly established Centre of Excellence at Augsburg university, “Europe: Culture, Education, and Religion between Regionalisation and Globalisation”, aims at throwing a new light on the history of melancholia, with regard to its thematic as well as formal-aesthetical consequences. It particularly intends to examine the interaction between the discourses of medicine, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, literature, art, and philosophy in terms of a European cultural history and its non-European, global connections and effects. To limit the subject to a manageable size, English literature, the cultural space of Great Britain, and its expansion through colonization, migration and knowledge transfer shall serve as examples to examine European discourses.
We invite contributions to the following fields:
(1) How were the European norms of psychic health and illness inherent in definitions of melancholia received and resignified in non-European, transatlantic cultures?
(2) Which regional as well as historical differences between concepts of melancholia existed within the ‘mother country’ England or Great Britain? The cultural encoding of melancholia as a mental state of higher creativity und deeper insight refers already to melancholia’s relevance for issues of culture and education. Here, questions are raised about the way of artists’ self-fashioning as melancholics and the regional as well as historical differences between, for instance, the melancholic craze in Elizabethan England and the characterization of Romantic poets as melancholics, both by themselves and by others.
(3) Can we assume, from a historical perspective, that a wave movement existed, that melancholia was torn between carrying a positive connotation as a creative state of mind (in the English Renaissance and particularly in Romanticism) and being stigmatized as a mental illness (for instance, in the neo-classical 18th century)?
(4) In addition to culture and education, religion kept playing a central role in the cultural discussion of melancholia. The concept of ‘religious melancholia’ includes a large number of psychosomatic symptoms in the England of the 17th and 18th centuries that carry, due to the religious wars in Europe, also political meanings. We would like to discuss whether and to what extent the current, intensely debated tendencies in postmodern, European societies towards a return to religion – or at least towards a re- or neo-spiritualizing of a formerly completely secularized way of life – can be compared to those historic precursors.

The above-raised questions shall be examined systematically in thematically focused panels. Scheduled panels include:

I. Melancholia and Gender
II. Melancholia and Genius
III. Melancholia and Temporality
IV. Melancholia and Religion
V. Melancholia and Mourning
VI. Melancholia, Politics, and Society
VII. Melancholia and (Post-)Colonial Discourse
VIII. Melancholia and (Post-)Modernism

Each selected paper will be allotted a 40 minutes slot and should allow for 10 minutes of discussion. Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be submitted with a short CV either electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf file format.

by June 1, 2008 to

Prof. Dr. phil. Martin Middeke
Dr. Christina Wald
Lehrstuhl für Englische Literaturwissenschaft
Universität Augsburg
Philologisch-Historische Fakultät
Universitätsstraße 10
86159 Augsburg
Germany
Tel. +49 821 598 2746 (-2611)
Fax +49 821 598 5638
Email: martin.middeke@phil.uni-augsburg.de
christina.wald@phil.uni-augsburg.de