Affective Mapping

<p>The surprising claim of this book is that dwelling on loss is not necessarily depressing. Instead Jonathan Flatley argues embracing melancholy can be a road back to contact with others and can lead people to productively remap their relationship to the world around them. Flatley demonstrates that a seemingly disparate set of modernist writers and thinkers showed how aesthetic activity can give us the means to comprehend and change our relation to loss. <p/>The texts at the center of Flatley's analysis--Henry James's <i>Turn of the Screw</i> W. E. B. Du Bois's <i>The Souls of Black Folk</i> and Andrei Platonov's <i>Chevengur</i>--share with Freud an interest in understanding the depressing effects of difficult losses and with Walter Benjamin the hope that loss itself could become a means of connection and the basis for social transformation. For Du Bois Platonov and James the focus on melancholy illuminates both the historical origins of subjective emotional life and a heretofore unarticulated community of melancholics. The affective maps they produce make possible the conversion of a depressive melancholia into a way to be interested in the world.</p>