Melancholy and Modernity: Dovid Bergelson’s Nokh Alemen

Ekphrasis, 2019

This article is concerned with art's exploration through melancholia of a world in disaster. We will investigate how art as a form of melancholia-akin to Derrida's concept of destinerrance-is not only testifying to its limits, but employing its limits, denouncing and performing its border (as in parages). In relation and in dialogue with Adorno's negative dialectics, we investigate the possibility of non-dialectical art as a non resolving discourse speaking through its melancholia. We will question whether Godard's famous announcement of the end of cinema, Wagner's Tristan chord or Parsifal's much debated ending are a monument to what Adorno would call impossible openness, if they are subjected to closure or, on the contrary, they are rather a melancholic assignable nonplace, both necessary and impossible to find, which enables art to speak of its own impossible closure. How does the end of Wagner's Ring cycle announce and contain the end of the world in Lars von Trier's Melancholia? Does The Turin Horse end the world in a melancholia of waiting in vain? Is the continuous flow of water in Marguerite Duras's film Aurelia Steiner speaking of an impossible arrival? The letter the narrator is reading to us opens up and remains hanging in this liquid and seemingly calm environment. How does filming the waters of the river Seine relate to Bill Viola's statement that true art cannot separate life from death? Why is Auschwitz a border stone for how we understand and make art today? And how is Penderecki putting the pieces together in deconstructing both silence and sound? By raising all these questions this article reprises Badiou's interrogation of the ethical possibility of art in a context of reparations prescribed by Adorno to a post-Auschwitz world, through exploring a fundamental non-violence on the part of identity towards what is different from it in order to cause a difference to begin. Can art be a locus of making reparations? Our thesis is that through exploring discontinuity, dissonance or silence a place is being constructed for an art that is possible after Auschwitz.

Cankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2021

The present study explores Anne Kingsmill Finch's "Ardelia to Melancholy" and Sabahattin Ali's "Melancholy" in terms of prolonged melancholia that afflicts the creative psyche of the authors. The study aims to analyse melancholic moods of the speakers represented through self-narratives, which serve as a curative method and means of expression. Based on the critical terminologies offered by Robert Burton and Julia Kristeva, the study argues that the two melancholic poems by Finch and Ali are comparable in terms of melancholic experience and that the melancholic states of the authors renovate into a milder form of melancholia, eventually indicating an aesthetic transformation through discursive poiesis. The study shows that the personas directly or indirectly try to overcome the state of objectless and causeless despondency by producing poetic discourse, and both melancholic cases are theoretically subject to an aesthetic transformation, but melancholia is observed to linger on the present cases. The paper concludes that the authors attempt to cure melancholia through poetic expression, and the very poems signpost a temporal possibility of repaired connection with language. Yet, the speakers are seen caught up in the disease in the last lines indicating retreat rather than treatment.

https://bergson.hypotheses.org/1286, 2019

The intricate relationship of fields like philosophy and literature is open to a broad array of interpretations and analyses. One such enterprise is Şerif Eskin’s book, Zaman ve Hafızanın Kıyısında: Tanpınar’ın Edebiyat, Estetik ve Düşünce Dünyasında Bergson Felsefesi (On the Edge of Time and Memory: The Philosophy of Bergson in Tanpınar’s World of Literature, Aesthetic and Thought). It is largely based on Eskin’s MA thesis. Eskin investigates the constructive role Bergsonian philosophy in Tanpınar’s literary works, not only in terms of form but also content. He also opens such projections into discussion and contextualizes Tanpınar in wider philosophical and literary circles both nationally and internationally. He concomitantly discusses where Tanpınar’s views and literary works are situated in the sociological and political realms of Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s, when Turkey was under the sway of a mass-scale modernization process.

Philologica Jassyensia, 2019

In this paper, I focus on the role played by material objects in the evocation of a specific imaginary of the recent past (mainly the 1970s and 1980s) in the literary works of Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov (in the novels “The Physics of Sorrow” and “Natural Novel”) and of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk (in “The Museum of Innocence”). I analyze the presence of feelings of melancholy and loss accompanied by a fixation on objects in the fictional works and describe their possible overcoming through an externalization in the form of museum exhibitions in the city of Sofia and Istanbul such as the “Inventory depository of Socialism” and the “Museum of Innocence”. By viewing objects as actors capable of creating meaningful social networks, I consider their use in the narration of personal and collective histories and their transformation as powerful symbols of a bygone era.

Accents and Paradoxes of Modern Philology, 2018

The article analyzes the principles of the ekphrastic combination of the text of the novel “Istanbul memories of a city” by Orhan Pamuk and the photographs in it. The functions of melancholy and the leading images of its presentation in the text are defined. In particular, the black and white color of the photo, the seriality of family photographs, the transformation of the photographic index into a full-fledged image in the process of syncretization of the art of words and photographs and the formation of an ekphrastic novel-photography. The mechanisms of the transformation of metexis into mimesis in the novel “Istanbul memories of a city”, considered by us above, reveal one pattern of modern novel: the growth of ekphrastic transformations of the text. Of course, the technological development of society played the great role here, but the author's choice remains the decisive factor, he concentrates on the Istanbul melancholy. It becomes the key to understanding the world, despi...

Dovid Bergelson's first novel, Nokh alemen (1913), is a landmark in the history of Yiddish literature. Its artistic achievements include the creation of an entirely new kind of literary language in Yiddish, and a solution to the problem of structure in the long prose narrative which opened the way for a new kind of novel in Yiddish.

This article is a psychoanalytic reading of Dawit Wendmagegn's novel 'Alamanor'. The objectives of the study are to analyze the unconscious motives and defense mechanism used by the characters in the novel. To achieve these objectives, textual analysis is made where extracts selected from the novel are critically examined. The extracts are selected depending on the meaning they carry from psychoanalytic perspectives and hence are critically analyzed from a specific angle, namely psychoanalytic literary critical approach. Common psychoanalytic notions like the id, ego and superego and defense mechanism are used to frame the analysis. After critical analysis is made, it is found out that for the present actions and lives of Adult characters in the novel, their past experiences and unconscious motives played determining factor. In relation to this, the psychoanalytical notion of 'childhood experience leads to adulthood personality' was also found to be true in the case of the characters in the novel. It is also found out that to repress the unconscious motives and drives, characters have used defense mechanism such as displacement and regression. Based on the finding, it is recommended that through literature we can get insight to the lives of characters in the fictional narratives. It is also recommended that as characters are representatives of human beings and that the psychological notions of characters have huge implications for human beings, parents should work on how they are treating their children because any action that the child faces could have a huge impact on his/her adult personality.

2019

International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 2023

This study aims to analyse and find a description of the subject of melancholia in the novel Bumi Manusia by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. This study is conducted with a cursive approach by using the perspective of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic study that looks for a small lost object. This research is a qualitative study using the literature study method. The main data source for this research is the novel Bumi Manusia by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. The results of this study found three types of melancholia subjects, namely generational melancholia, cultural melancholia, and alienation melancholia. Nyai Ontosoroh as the main character in the novel Bumi Manusia by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, is a melancholia subject who experiences all three types of melancholia, namely generational melancholia, cultural melancholia, and alienation melancholia. Furthermore, the character Minke experiences two types of melancholia, namely cultural melancholia and alienation melancholia. Nyai Ontosoroh as the main character in the novel Bumi Manusia by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, is a melancholia subject who experiences all three types of melancholia, namely generational melancholia, cultural melancholia, and alienation melancholia. Furthermore, the character Minke experiences two types of melancholia, namely cultural melancholia and alienation melancholia. Nyai Ontosoroh and Minke are subjects that represent the author's view that wants to criticize two social systems, namely feudal society (colonized) and modern capitalist society (colonizer). These two social systems bring profound changes to the clash of generations in the world of the colonized. The subject's reaction to the changing values of society made them face a clash of cultures and eventually feel a tremendous alienation in their lives.

Revista Garrafa, 2007

Even then his trembling tongue invok'd his bride; With his last voice, "Eurydice", he cry'd, "Eurydice", the rocks and riverbanks reply'd.' Orpheus sings the loss of Eurydice. He sings her absence, and the voice of that absence stirs the shades of Hell, stills the roar of animals, and moves the very rocks to pity. The song of Orpheus is the dream of a poetic diction, of a singing, whose intensity lifts it beyond the crowded complacency of the everyday to uncover a cadence that disrupts the monotonous churning of the world. A song that will force itself even upon the obdurate inaccessibility of stone: such is the dream that has carried the voice of Orpheus beyond the banks of the river Hebrus to echo across the shores of our own turgid and difficult times. That the force of this singing is born of the articulation of an absence-out of pain, out of loss-must render this image of special significance in any speculation on the relations of absence to imagination, of sorrow to song, of melancholy to the libidinal economies of artistic expression. It is with a view to exploring some of these connections that this paper is written. It will move from a discussion of Blanchot's dense and cryptic reflection on the myth of Orpheus from his 1955 volume 'L'Espace Litteraire', to the exploration of a parallel theoretical moment in the idea of 'melancholic imagination' developed by Kristeva in 'Soleil Noir' of 1977.