Melancholy Utopia: Loss and Fantasy in Contemporary American Literature and Film

My project examines sites of social and psychic resistance to forfeiting loss in contemporary literature, film, and philosophy. I call these textual, cinematic, and performative spaces of resistance melancholy utopia. Working at the intersection of affect theory, queer studies, and psychoanalysis, I argue for the utopian potential in the protracted grieving of melancholia. The pathologization of grief in contemporary Western culture proceeds from the incessant demand for productivity inherent to late-stage capitalism: extended mourning is unproductive and economically inefficient, an emotional nuisance. Therefore, I focus on the violence that is intrinsic to the temporal demands made on mourning and argue that there is an innate counterhegemonic impulse in the melancholic’s steadfast grief. The melancholic subject resists the violent injunction to “move on” from her sorrow and creates instead an affective utopia that allows him or her to experience his or her pain and new forms of thinking. By focusing on post-1945 literature and film, I chart the “ugly” affect of melancholia and the contemporary salience of utopian dreaming. Although the authors and directors through whose work I develop the concept of melancholy utopia are otherwise diverse, they share a preoccupation with the relationship between loss and fantasy. My first chapter interrogates critical analyses of grief (Jacques Derrida), failure and lack (Judith Halberstam; Jacques Lacan), queer futurity (Lee Edelman), and utopia (José Muñoz). My next three chapters chart melancholy utopia and the alternative kinship relations it fosters in the kitchens of the American South (Carson McCullers; Harmony Korine), in the literary archive (David Foster Wallace), and in New Queer Cinema (Jennie Livingston; Sean Baker). Each chapter illustrates melancholy utopia as the nexus of pain and hope in modern grief. My project thus has broader implications for rethinking the discursive limits of kinship, love, and ethical fidelity in our contemporary moment.Ph.D.2018-11-30 00:00:0