For Your Post Assignment:

I am interested in hearing about your reactions to the novel and what exactly has stood out to you thus far.

I want you to select a brief passage from the chapters you are reading this weekend of about 3 to 7 lines. This should be a passage that seems significant, strange, provocative, problematic, or otherwise interesting to you in some way. This passage, for example, might:

• Provide a rather striking and/or telling portrait of our narrator (David).
• Provide a rich description of a particular setting or character.
• Reveal on the part of David or another character particular attitudes toward queerness/homosexuality.
• Offer a striking image or set of images (In other words, are there any places where you feel the language of the novel allows you to see vividly a particular thing, place, character, or something else?).
• Relate to any one of the themes we have discussed thus far: happiness, loss, mourning, melancholia, and more.
• Do something else you find interesting and worthy of discussion!

After typing out the passage in full, please compose approximately two paragraphs of analysis, with each paragraph containing at least six to seven sentences. In your analysis, I want you to explore your chosen passage, explicating what exactly about this passage seems to be so significant.

(E.g. What was the image that you found so striking? Why? How exactly does your passage relate to our discussion of happiness? What does this passage reveal about our narrator? What kind of portrait of queerness does your passage offer? Might you relate something from your passage to Freud’s model of mourning vs. melancholia?)

Submit your response below as a comment.

COMPLETE BY TUESDAY, 9/26 @ 5 PM.

A Note on the Text:

This essay will be a challenging read. Do your best, and we will be addressing any questions or confusion next week Tuesday during class.

Please know I am NOT expecting you to understand everything you read here. Indeed, you do not have to understand everything in Freud’s essay to excel in this class! Your main goal here is to begin tracing the differences between mourning and melancholia.

In Freud’s essay, he elaborates upon two different psychological reactions to loss: mourning and melancholia (duh). In speaking about loss, Freud is not speaking JUST about the loss of a loved one due to death, but a number of different kinds of losses that people experience regularly in their lives: the loss of a job, the loss of one’s home, the loss of a belief in some higher ideal, etc.

According to his analysis, mourning is a “healthy” response to loss, whereas melancholia is an “unhealthy” or “pathological” response to loss.

At a VERY basic level, mourning entails the ability to “get over” loss, and melancholia entails the inability to “get over” loss.

Some Key Terms*:

*Thanks to The Internet™ for these definitions.

Reality testing: A process of distinguishing one’s internal thoughts, feelings, and ideas from external reality. In other words, in the process of reality testing, one might ask themselves, “Are my thoughts and emotions reflective of the actual circumstances/realities of my life? Am I overreacting? Am I in denial?”

Psychosis: A severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality. In other words, one’s ability to reality test is severely compromised.

Libido: The Latin word libido, meaning “desire, lust,” was borrowed by Sigmund Freud as the name for a concept in his own theories. At first, he defined libido to mean the instinctual energy associated with the sex drive. Later he broadened the word’s meaning and began using it to mean the mental energy behind purposeful human activity of any kind; in other words, the libido (for which Freud also used the term eros, a Greek word meaning “sexual love”) came to be regarded as the life instinct, which included sex along with all the other impulses we rely on to keep us alive. This includes the very deep emotional and mental attachments we make to others in our lives.

Ego: The part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious and is responsible for reality testing and a sense of personal identity. You might also think of the ego as a person’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance.

Object Choice: A person or thing external to the ego chosen as a focus of desire OR sexual activity.

Cathexis: The concentration of mental or emotional energy to a person, object, or idea.

Ambivalence: The state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone. This is often extreme, according to Freud, consisting of a simultaneous feeling of loving and hating an object.

After You Read “Mourning and Melancholia”

DO NOT READ THE RESPONSES OF YOUR CLASSMATES YET. Try to address the following questions to the best of your ability WITHOUT consulting what your classmates have written. Please compose approximately two or three paragraphs, with each paragraph containing at least six to seven sentences. Submit your response below as a comment.

COMPLETE BY TUESDAY, 9/19 @ 5 PM.

• Describe in what context you first encountered the words “mourning” and “melancholia.” How would you have defined these terms BEFORE reading Freud’s essay?
• To the best of your ability, and in your own words, explain the key differences between the concepts of mourning and melancholia as they are presented by Freud. What, in other words, does mourning “look like” according to Freud? What does melancholia “look like”? What are their similarities? What are their differences?
• To help you describe these terms, please provide an illustrative example from a movie, a book, a TV show, your own life, or your imagination to help better demonstrate the difference between these two terms. DO YOUR BEST. IT IS OK IF YOU DO NOT GET IT QUITE RIGHT!

For this first post assignment, I would like you to address two tasks/questions after reading Ahmed’s “Happiness and Queer Politics.”

• Ahmed examines in great detail the ways in which happiness and unhappiness shape the promises and pitfalls of queer life. Analyze a point or argument that Ahmed makes in “Happiness and Queer Politics” that you find particularly convincing, surprising, problematic, or interesting in some other way. After explaining Ahmed’s idea, consider how it has confirmed, transformed, or problematized your understanding of happiness and the ways in which it shapes queers in particular and society in general.
• Ahmed ends her essay by reflecting on the potential for UNhappiness to enrich queer life and politics. She writes: “Queer politics might radicalize freedom as the freedom to be unhappy. The freedom to be unhappy would be the freedom to live a life that deviates from the paths of happiness, wherever that deviation takes us. It would mean the freedom to cause unhappiness by acts of deviation. Queer enjoyment can thus be expressed as an embodiment of the freedom to be unhappy.” What are some ways, politically or in our day-to-day lives, that one might promote, “the freedom to be unhappy”? In your opinion, do you think that such a political project is desireable? Are there any risks associated with this?

Please address these two questions together or separately in at least two full, well-thought-out paragraphs.

Due on TUESDAY, September 12th, at 5 PM. (I.E. BEFORE CLASS!)