From mourning to melancholia : voicing authorship in its loss

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2002
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Haverford College. Department of Philosophy
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The Charles Schwartz Memorial Prize in Philosophy
The Newton Prize in English Literature
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
How do writers mourn for their unconscious alienation from the authorial norm? Sigmund Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia," and its more recent applications to psychoanalytic trauma theory, illuminates the latency of the writer's melancholia, whose alienation is belatedly experienced out of time. For just this reason, Freud prescribes against melancholia as grief's privative disorder to which mourning is a recuperative process. Contra Freud, the essay works to recover the writer's melancholia from Freud's reading of its lack as unredeemably debilitating. An initial inquiry into why writers suffer melancholic loss will proceed to ask how melancholia addresses its authorial other within the writerly self. How does authorship fashion its mode of self-relation vis-a-vis loss? The latter project focuses itself through an analysis of elegiac poetry and Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" as the paradigmatic mode of relation in and through which writers confront their authorial self-abstention. Here, Gray's poem grounds the study of the call and response between self and absent other, which defines the rhetoric of prosopopeia. In particular, prosopopeia's dialogic imperative to tell and be heard envisions how melancholia might rehabilitate the writer's unconscious loss.
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