Romantic moods english11/23/2023 ![]() Even though you watch the petals shrink and change colour, you cannot help treasuring them.” – Munia Khan “Love is like dried flowers sometimes.“You are that one breath, that puts all the remaining breaths back into my body.” –Sanober Khan.“And I’d choose you, in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.” – Kiersten White.By invoking Gothic-Romantic aesthetics, Melancholia equally summons its pessimistic (albeit vitalist) philosophy, exposing the limitations of an anthropocentric civilization and the fragility of its normative human bonds. ![]() ![]() Gothic-Romantic aspects of Melancholia's cinematic landscapes include its settings (a castle with vast surrounding gardens) the use of the motif of the double in its characterization (two sisters: one light, one dark) its hyper-subjectivity, apparent not only in the unsteady handheld camerawork but also in the overstated quality of its sound its manifestly Romantic soundtrack (Wagner's overture of Tristan und Isolde) its melodramatic structure its Pre-Raphaelite visual tableaux its dystopian depiction of civilizational collapse in the intimate scope of family relationships and its suggestion of the sublime (contradictory emotions of pleasure and fear) through supernatural phenomena. Originating as a reflection on the inadequacy of logical and discursive knowledge in a larger-than-human world, melancholy fuses the experience of a heightened self-consciousness with the quality of a pessimistic gloomy feeling. The feeling of melancholy was particularly present in Gothic-Romantic literature, fine arts, music, and philosophy. At the light of Gothic-Romantic theory and aesthetics, as well as of recent ecocritical approaches to film, this paper explores the spatial settings and sensory landscapes of von Trier's work. The introduction then poses a series of questions in order to frame the issue's overall scope and concerns: What would it mean to locate, or generate, an anarchist turn in romanticism, and a corresponding return of romanticism for anarchism? What developments in the fields of anarchist studies and romantic literary criticism make it possible to think these two disciplines together today? And in what ways does the idea of anarchy, more broadly construed as a figure for the deconstitution of disciplinary archē, raise questions about the very identity and nature of a critical field? How might anarchism provide useful coordinates for romantic studies to navigate a post-Marxist critical landscape?Ī sense of impending global catastrophe and a critique of anthropocentric progress mark Lars Von Trier latest film, Melancholia (2011). ![]() In so doing, the essay argues that the recent anarchist turn necessitates the subsequent re-turn of and to its roots in romantic-era literature. Looking to the dramatic resurgence of cultural and academic interest in anarchist ideas in recent years, which some critics have called an “anarchist turn” across the disciplines, the essay explores how these master narratives have begun to break down. This essay serves as an introduction to a collection of essays on the topic of “Romantic Anarchism.” Along with providing a summary of the main points of each essay, the introduction undertakes a critical and historical analysis of the master narratives through which romanticism and anarchism have been historically linked, usually in order to be dismissed, such as the charge that both are theoretically confused, unscientific, too contradictory, too “aesthetic,” practically unworkable, as well as politically and emotionally immature.
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