Details

ISBN-10: 0822352389
ISBN-13: 9780822352389
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publish Date: 11/05/2012
Dimensions: 9.00" L, 6.00" W, 0.80" H

Depression: A Public Feeling

Paperback

Price: $27.95

Overview

In Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich combines memoir and critical essay in search of ways of writing about depression as a cultural and political phenomenon that offer alternatives to medical models. She describes her own experience of the professional pressures, creative anxiety, and political hopelessness that led to intellectual blockage while she was finishing her dissertation and writing her first book. Building on the insights of the memoir, in the critical essay she considers the idea that feeling bad constitutes the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism.

Cvetkovich draws on an unusual archive, including accounts of early Christian acedia and spiritual despair, texts connecting the histories of slavery and colonialism with their violent present-day legacies, and utopian spaces created from lesbian feminist practices of crafting. She herself seeks to craft a queer cultural analysis that accounts for depression as a historical category, a felt experience, and a point of entry into discussions about theory, contemporary culture, and everyday life. Depression: A Public Feeling suggests that utopian visions can reside in daily habits and practices, such as writing and yoga, and it highlights the centrality of somatic and felt experience to political activism and social transformation.

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Reviews
"A provocative addition to Ann Cvetkovich's eloquent writings on the archives of public feelings, this book takes depression out of the space of the private into the complex politics of our time. Weaving together memoir, cultural and medical history, and literary and theoretical discussion, Cvetkovich experiments with and reflects on unconventional ways of writing about embodiment, cognition, and affect. Along the way, she offers myriad prescriptions, small and large, on how to cope with the daily effects of depression and how to heal the world."–Marianne Hirsch, author of The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust
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Details

ISBN-10: 0822352389
ISBN-13: 9780822352389
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publish Date: 11/05/2012
Dimensions: 9.00" L, 6.00" W, 0.80" H
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