Misery's Mathematics: Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum American LiteratureThis book reveals the strain of a moment in American cultural history that led several remarkable writers -- including Emerson, Warner, and Melville -- to render the stark rupture of loss in innovative ways. Pushing Protestant culture's sense of loss into secular terrain, these three key writers rejected Calvinist and sentimental models of bereavement, creating instead the compensations of a mature American literature whose 'originality' stemmed from its capacity to mourn the loss of a common culture and, through such mourning, to assent to new social and cultural realities. Balaam locates this appeal to 'reality' in the analogies antebellum writers drew between their experience of bereavement, and the experiences of uncertainty and disillusionment, that followed the revolutions in science, the winding down of creedal systems and the economic instability typifying the pre-Civil War era. |
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... observes, “is not only the number andvariety ofresponse systems which areengaged buttheway in whichthey tendtoconflict with one another.”The lossofa “loved objectgives risenot onlytoan intensifieddesire for reunion but to hatredofthe ...
... observes the “meek party”of thedead thus installedinthe white andcool privacy of the gravetoawait “theResurrection” of soulsattheend of time,butsubverts the viability of such beliefs(and thefunereal practices theysupport) in her doubts ...
... observes, quoting Geertz, “'will accountfor, and even celebrate the perceived ambiguities, puzzles,and paradoxes of human experience'”(3). Like thereckonings producedfrom “misery's mathematics” inthepresent study, theodicies ...
... observes, andso forthis disequilibrium to beovercome, every association and expectation of the ego toward the lost object must be raised, frustrated, and with pain,severed. Mourning beginsand is carriedoutover the course of time ...
... more likelytorepresent apolarity,the opposing forces ofwhichshape any experience of bereavement.Inwhat follows Ido at timesmake referencetoFreud's distinction but do so with emphases influenced by Eric Santner, who observes Freud's.
Other editions - View all
Misery's Mathematics: Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum ... Peter Balaam Limited preview - 2009 |
Misery's Mathematics: Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum ... Peter Balaam No preview available - 2016 |
Misery's Mathematics: Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum ... Peter Balaam No preview available - 2009 |