Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2005, French and Italian

To examine how melancholy has been represented in French writing from the medieval period to the seventeenth century, this dissertation attempts to compare its depiction in literary works with contemporary original medical texts. The historical knowledge of the periods in question is used as a tool in order to seek to understand the literature, or literary discourse, in a fuller way, and to situate it more clearly in the evolving context of both medical and literary practices with respect to the concept of melancholy and its transformation. Melancholy appeared as an illness of the upper-class, and the writers of the thirteenth to the seventeenth century chosen for this study were writing primarily for this particular audience. In chapter one, the study of descriptions of melancholy and related states in the Roman de la rose, as well as fabliaux and nouvelles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, suggests that humor and divertissement, or entertainment, are indispensable for the good health of human beings. Without them, people risk becoming melancholic. Chapter two explores how Montaigne, through his study of human nature and thanks to melancholy, discovers that mind and body need to be kept together at all times when portraying or studying man. If this is not respected, man can become a “fool,” which can lead to melancholy. Chapter three examines how for Descartes, melancholy is the illness which best represents man's weakness, its seat being the very union of body and soul. In chapter four, I argue that the medical and literary knowledge about melancholy discovered in the first chapters is synthesized in the comedies chosen. The authors studied here use melancholy to understand, define, represent, in other words, to figure human nature, and examine human weaknesses at a deeper level than does any other disease. This illness can be countered by “entertaining” the mind, and consequently can be treated with laughter and entertainment, which prove to be the best (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sarah-Grace Heller (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Germanic Languages and Literatures

Wim Wenders creates films that make a virtue of cinema`s encounter with reality, insisting that cinema`s referential quality imbues it with a unique relationship to our encounter with the world over and against other art forms. This idea frequently serves as a point of departure for his narratives. His characters—often photographers, writers, or filmmakers—share a common desire to experience the world and to represent it in their own media. Nevertheless, their mediation is not without difficulty; these characters misunderstand the relationships between media, time, art, the world, and themselves. In this dissertation, I show that their seemingly innocuous activities belie an overarching theme of melancholy in Wenders` films. Through this thematic and formal engagement with melancholy—understood as a combination of social isolation and self-estrangement that cyclically perpetuates itself—Wenders enters into a discussion about photographic mediation that spans the twentieth century. While Bela Balazs, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Rudolf Arnheim contribute to this discourse, I root my understanding of melancholy primarily in the film theory with which Wenders is most familiar, in particular, Siegfried Kracauer`s Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality and his subsequent work, which expands on film`s relationship to time, History: The Last Things Before the Last. This theoretical perspective that I call the -redemptive realist tradition‖ emphasizes film`s documentary capability to mediate an encounter with phenomena that would otherwise elude perception, thereby -redeeming‖ them in Kracauer`s vocabulary through what I call his -photo-historical approach.‖ I find that this approach and the process of resolving melancholy parallel one another, thereby offering Wender`s characters the chance to redeem the phenomena of their perception while overcoming their estrangement and isolation. In order to investigate the development of melancholy in Wenders` wor (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: John Davidson Ph.D. (Advisor); Robert Holub Ph.D. (Committee Member); Schotter Jesse Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Germanic Literature

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2014, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Critics of Tennyson view his melancholy poetics as a self-evident manifestation. However, not until recently have scholars examined melancholy as a rhetorical structure in Tennyson's poetry. To address this particular gap in scholarly research, this thesis examines the use of black, similar images, and descriptive language in Tennyson"s "Mariana and the Moated Grange," "Mariana in the South," and "The Lady of Shalott." From a close reading of the text and a comparative analysis of Tennyson's poetry, common connections between the four poems become clear. These connections emerge through the contextual evidence for melancholy existing in the imagery, diction, and syntax of Tennyson's writings. Tennyson's use of colors and images creates not only an atmosphere reflective of melancholia, but also manifests the melancholy effect of the restrictive Victorian gaze on the freer imaginary elements of the Romantics. This research provides a framework for identifying the traits of Tennyson's melancholic rhetoric found throughout his poetry. Therefore, this framework offers a starting point for further study of the rhetorical and stylistic development of melancholy in Tennyson's poetry. Additionally, by juxtaposing the obvious melancholic themes in the two Mariana poems with "The Lady of Shalott," one can interpret this poem as more than a representation of the isolated poet. Thus "The Lady of Shalott" when examined in tandem with The "Mariana" poems, affords the necessary link between the imagination and melancholy. Hence, a close examination of "The Lady of Shalott" illuminates the melancholy which overshadows the unbridled imagination.

Committee: Rachel Carnell PhD (Committee Chair); Gary Dyer PhD (Committee Member); Jennifer Jeffers PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

MFA, Kent State University, 2023, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

Rain & Otherwise is a poetry compilation that examines intimacy through various modes of the human experience. Among these experiences are themes of grief, existentialism, gender and sexuality, weather and global warming, space (micro v. macro), and familial lineage. This project aims to push the bounds of meaning and form through understatement, fragmentation of punctuation and space, and primarily sound as it relates literally to the ear and figuratively through interpreted meanings. This project is a result of the times we all find ourselves in, and ultimately strives to comfort the anxious souls of the era.

Committee: Caryl Pagel (Advisor); Chris Barzak (Committee Member); Catherine Wing (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Music

Music, perhaps more than any other art form, is able to influence moods and affect behavior. There are limitless accounts of music eliciting feelings of nostalgia, transcendence, and other seemingly ineffable emotions. In the scientific study of music and emotion, however, only five music-induced emotions have been studied in depth: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and tenderness (Juslin, 2013). Although these emotions are certainly important and can be expressed and elicited through music listening, a pertinent question becomes the following: do these five words accurately capture all affective states related to music? Throughout my dissertation, I argue that in order to better understand emotional responses to musical stimuli, we need to change the way we use emotional terminology and examine emotional behaviors. In the first part of the dissertation (Chapters 1-4), I review how emotional music has been theoretically characterized and which excerpts have been utilized in research. I will show that the field of music and emotion is fraught with conceptual difficulties and that passages of music expressing a single emotion (e.g., sadness) span an unmanageably large area of emotional space. The second part of the dissertation (Chapters 5-8) provides an in-depth analysis of music that has been classified by other researchers as sad. I will show that previous research has conflated at least two separable emotional states under the umbrella term sadness: melancholy and grief. Through a series of behavioral experiments, I argue that melancholic and grief-like music utilize different kinds of music-theoretic structures, are perceived as separate emotional states, and result in different feeling states. In the last part of the dissertation (Chapters 9-11), I offer two possible interpretations of the research findings, drawing first from the field of ethology to show that melancholy and grief could be separable emotion states that have different biological functions and (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Daniel Shanahan (Advisor); David Huron (Committee Member); Anna Gawboy (Committee Member); Dónal O’Mathúna (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts; Music; Psychology; Social Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1978, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2013, English

This dissertation traces the recurrence of melancholia in post-1980 American culture and literature about the psychological consequences of atrocity and sudden loss. Narratives within this subset often concern Vietnam combat, slavery, rape, the Holocaust, the perpetration of violence, the attacks on September 11, or the suicide of loved ones, and critics have frequently analyzed such works within the context of trauma studies. I argue that such a critical lens, with its postmodern attention to representation, deemphasizes subjective states of ambivalence, reality-testing, mourning, and self-negation, which are major components of melancholia that Sigmund Freud described in his 1917 essay, "Mourning and Melancholia". After demonstrating how these subjective states uniquely surface in novels by Tim O'Brien, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Don DeLillo, I reveal how melancholia emerges within the contemporary cultural mindset as a symptom of postmodernism's rejection of the reality principle - a metaphysical foundation necessary for mourning. Mourning, these writers all demonstrate, is simultaneously wanted and rejected within a postmodern milieu composed of overlapping realities, infinite translation, and representational aporia. From this argument I thus bring the following postulates to the surface: that the framework of melancholia has an ethical advantage when it comes to addressing the subjectivity and complicity of victims of atrocity and loss, especially as it concerns their individual recoveries; that the framework of melancholia has an analytical advantage when it comes to theorizing mourning, loss, and the management of desire; and that the framework of melancholia reveals an underlying cultural condition of impossible mourning within the period known today as the postmodern.

Committee: Timothy Melley (Advisor); Madelyn Detloff (Committee Member); Andrew Hebard (Committee Member); Robert Thurston (Other) Subjects: American Literature; Literature; Mental Health; Philosophy; Psychology

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2010, French, Italian, and Classical Studies

This paper examines two works by the author Marguerite Duras in an effort to determine the relationship between genre and for and the protagonists' experience of traumatic and melancholic memory. The psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan as well as Jacques Derrida's discussion of writing and context are used to explore how the form of a work, especially the use of images and sound in film, affect the relationship of a character (and thus, a person) to the language they use to recount a traumatic event and through that language to the event itself and their ability to work through it.

Committee: Jonathan Strauss PhD (Advisor); Elisabeth Hodges PhD (Committee Member); Sven-Erik Rose PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature