Jennifer Radden: Melancholy

HONORS 241: Melancholy Spring 2007
Instructor: Jennifer Radden
Office: Philosophy Department
W/5/18. Telephone 287-6546
Office Hours: Wednesdays 11.00-1.00

Course Description
For most of Western European history melancholy was a central cultural idea, focusing, explaining and organizing the way people saw the world and one another and framing social, medical and epistemological norms. In this course we shall read and discuss some of the most influential sources on melancholy in the long tradition which can be seen to end in 1917, with Freud’s essay on mourning and melancholia, including work from the Greek physicians Hippocrates and Galen, from Aristotle, from Renaissance thinkers such as Ficino, Bright and Burton, mystics like St Teresa of Avila, and chemists and scientists of the eighteenth century such as Boerhaave, as well as Romantic poets such as Keats. We will conclude by reading from the great classics of medical psychiatry: Pinel, Kraepelin and Freud.

This material is medical, literary, and philosophical, and our approach will be interdisciplinary. However, focus will be placed on conceptual questions about melancholy - what it is; its categorization, definition, and origin; the subjective qualities of melancholic states; and the ambiguous relationship it bears to the clinical depression of the twentieth century.

Assignments and Grade Structure
Students will be expected to write two short essays (4-5 pages) and one long essay (8-10 pages) and to prepare and deliver an oral presentation (10 minutes). Final grades will be based on the two short essays (20% each), the long essay( 40%) and the oral presentation (20%). There are no exams.

Communicating with Students: I will do this via an email list using your UMB accounts. So if you actually have another eddress, make sure you arrange to get messages from the UMB account forwarded to the one you look at regularly.

Required Text
Many of our readings are in The Nature of Melancholy edited by myself (Oxford, 2000), available at the bookstore.

Course Outline and Reading Guide
Electronic Reserve [password: ] = [R]
The Nature of Melancholy = NM

Required readings are listed with three asterists thus (***) , suggested readings with two (**) and additional readings with one (*). You are not expected to more than dip into the final category of these additional readings as time or interest permits.

Introductory
Jan 30
Section 1 - Greek and Greco-Arabic Humoral Medicine
Feb 1,6,8,13
Bennett Simon, ‘The Hippocratic Corpus’ from Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece**[R]; Aristotle (or a follower of Aristotle), Galen, and Avicenna*in NM.*** Thiher, Revels in Madness: Insanity in Medicine and Literature, Chapter 1*[R}.

Section 2 - Renaissance Writing on Melancholy
Feb 15,20,22, 27, March 1
Pico della Mirandola passage***[I’ll send you this electronically}; Jackson, Melancholia and Depression Chapter 5 ** [R]; Ficino, Weyer, Teresa of Avila, Bright, Burton in NM***

Section 3 - Melancholy in the Fine Arts
March 3, 6, 8
Klibansky et. al, excerpts from Saturn and Melancholy*[R]
Gilman, Preface from Seeing the Insane**[R]

Section 4 - Melancholia and Spleen in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
March 13,15
Butler, Finch and Boerhaave in NM***; Jackson, Melancholia and Depression Chapter 7, also pp 12-14 (Introduction)**[R]. Thiher, Revels in Madness: Insanity in Medicine and Literature, Chapter 4*[R]

S P R I N G B R E A K

Section 5 - Early Psychiatry and Romantic Poetry
March 27,29, April 3
Pinel, Rush, Keats in NM***; additional poems by Romantics**[R]; Praz,
excerpts from The Romantic Agony**[R]. Thiher, Revels in Madness: Insanity
in Medicine and Literature, Chapter 9*[R]

Section 6 - Kraepelin’s Classification into Manic-Depressive Illness
April 5,10
Kraepelin in NM***; Radden, ‘Lumps and Bumps’*[R]

Section 7 - Melancholia, Narcissism and Loss
April 12, 17, 24
Freud in NM***; Wilkerson, ???*[R]

Section 8 - Melancholia, Depression and Gender
April 26, May 1
Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia Introduction**, and Chapter 5*[R]

Section 9 – Melancholy and Social Constructionism
May 1, 8, 10
Church, ‘Social Constructionist: Making Order out of Disorder’***[R]; Foucault, Madness and Civilization Chapter VI*[Healy electronic holidings]
Essay and Presentation Dates and Details

Write a brief essay (4-5 pages), due February 27, on the following: Present day assumptions about clinical depression – what it is, and how we should respond to it in ourselves and others - stem from, and include, its status as an abnormal condition of internal disregulation that affects bodily, social and or occupational functioning.

Identify some key similarities and differences between Greco-Arabic accounts of melancholia such as we find in Galen and/or Avicenna, and (what you know of) today’s assumptions about clinical depression such as those noted above.
NB This is a “think” piece, so book research is unnecessary.

Write a brief essay (4-5 pages), due March 15, on the following:
Ficino, Bright and Burton share many similarities but also differ in their ideas about melancholy, in orientation, style, presuppositions and conclusions. Choose any pair of these three authors and develop a review of their writing employing a compare/contrast method.

In-class Presentations (ten minutes long, with another five for questions). Dates to be fixed in the second week of classes.
Choose a work of art, a short poem, song, or a prose passage aside from those studied in class. In introducing and discussing this work, show how, using iconographic conventions or other methods, its author conveys traditional conceptions of melancholy and or of the compensations melancholy is thought to bring.

Long essay (8-10 pages) due May 10.
Melancholy has been said to be a largely socially constructed category. But how largely, and what exactly does that claim mean? Develop your answer making use of at least three of the early modern, and modern texts we have read in the second half of this course and of Church’s discussion of social constructionism and mental disorder.