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Sánchez-Pardo argues that the troubled political atmosphere leading to both world wars created a melancholia fueled by "cultures of the death drive" and the related specters of object loss--loss of coherent and autonomous selves, of social orders where stability reigned, of metaphysical guarantees, and, in some cases, loss and fragmentation of empire. This melancholia permeated, and even propelled, modernist artistic discourses. Sánchez-Pardo shows how the work of Melanie Klein, the theorist of melancholia par excellence, uniquely illuminates modernist texts, particularly their representations of gender and sexualities. She offers a number of readings--of works by Virginia Woolf, René Magritte, Lytton Strachey, Djuna Barnes, and Countee Cullen--that reveal the problems melancholia posed for verbal and visual communication and the narrative and rhetorical strategies modernist artists derived to either express or overcome them. In her afterword, Sánchez-Pardo explicates the connections between modernist and contemporary melancholia.
A valuable contribution to psychoanalytic theory, gender and sexuality studies, and the study of representation in literature and the visual arts, Cultures of the Death Drive is a necessary resource for those interested in the work of Melanie Klein.
Author: Esther Sánchez-Pardo
ISBN-10: 0822330091
ISBN-13: 9780822330097
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 05/01/2003
Pages: 504
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.85lbs
Size: 9.90h x 7.10w x 1.40d
Review Citation(s):
Choice 06/01/2004 pg. 1965
Esther Sánchez-Pardo is Associate Professor of English at Complutense University in Madrid. She has written and edited numerous books in Spanish.
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