The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects - Softcover

Schwenger, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816646317 ISBN 13: 9780816646319

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2006

Synopsis

We surround ourselves with material things that are invested with memories but can only stand for what we have lost. Physical objects - such as one's own body - situate and define us; yet at the same time they are fundamentally indifferent to us. The melancholy of this rift is a rich source of inspiration for artists. Peter Schwenger deftly weaves together philosophical and psychoanalytical theory with artistic practice. Concerned in part with the act of collecting, "The Tears of Things" is itself a collection of exemplary art objects - literary and cultural attempts to control and possess things - including paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe and Rene Magritte; sculpture by Louise Bourgeois and Marcel Duchamp; Joseph Cornell's boxes; Edward Gorey's graphic art; fiction by Virginia Woolf, Georges Perec, and Louise Erdrich; the hallucinatory encyclopedias of Jorge Luis Borges and Luigi Serafini; and the corpse photographs of Joel Peter Witkin. However, these representations of objects perpetually fall short of our aspirations. Schwenger examines what is left over - debris and waste - and asks what art can make of these. What emerges is not an art that reassembles but one that questions what it means to assemble in the first place. Contained in this catalog of waste is that ultimate still life, the cadaver, where the subject-object dichotomy receives its final ironic reconciliation. It reveals the object as the self's ultimate other.

About this title

Product Description:

Rare Book

About the Author:

Peter Schwenger is professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning, Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word, and Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature.

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0816646317
• ISBN 13: 9780816646319
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224