The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film

by Alessia Ricciardi

Overview

The Ends of Mourning explores from an interdisciplinary perspective the contemporary crisis of mourning. In an age skeptical of history and memory, we relate to the past only as a spectacle, a product to be consumed in the cultural marketplace.

The book charts the emergence and development of the problem of mourning in the writings of Freud, Proust, and Freud's successor Lacan. Freud's idea of "sorrow work" and Proust's concept of involuntary memory defined the terms of the classic modernist account of mourning in the fields of psychoanalysis and literature. Yet their insistence on the egotistical aspects of loss to the exclusion of all ethical and political considerations threatens the dissolution of the question of mourning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804747776
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	08/19/2003
Series:	Cultural Memory in the Present
Edition description:	1
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Alessia Ricciardi is Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Northwestern University.

Editorial Reviews

"Alessia Ricciardi's The Ends of Mourning is a cogently argued and beautifully written work that deals with the fascinating and timely question of mourning. Ricciardi's book advances the existing body of work on trauma by considering the place of mourning in the transition from modernity to postmodernity. This place is, we learn, a missing place, for there is an important sense in which mourning is absent from the collective theoretical consciousness of our time; with a few exceptions, theory of the postmodern era has tended to promote a sense of the post-historical, as though we could somehow be simply free and clear of the past without ever having to mourn it. Ricciardi has set herself the task of uncovering just how mourning came to be evacuated from critical discourse in the era of late capitalism, and what the consequences of this gesture have been."

Barnard College - Peter Connor

"Alessia Ricciardi's truly outstanding book makes a significant contribution to critical theory in general and to psychoanalytically informed cultural criticism in particular. In many respects, it will prove to be a landmark study. . . . The End of Mourning is an extensive, brilliant, and brilliantly executed exposition of a complex and challenging theoretical and historical argument: that twentieth-century culture and thought has been impoverished—in spite of a fascination and indeed obsession with all things historical—by refusal to consider the implications of Freud's emphasis on mourning as a proper way of relating to the past."

New York University - Ulrich Baer

"Alessia Ricciardi's The Ends of Mourning is a cogently argued and beautifully written work that deals with the fascinating and timely question of mourning. Ricciardi's book advances the existing body of work on trauma by considering the place of mourning in the transition from modernity to postmodernity. This place is, we learn, a missing place, for there is an important sense in which mourning is absent from the collective theoretical consciousness of our time; with a few exceptions, theory of the postmodern era has tended to promote a sense of the post-historical, as though we could somehow be simply free and clear of the past without ever having to mourn it. " —Peter Connor,Barnard College


"Alessia Ricciardi's truly outstanding book makes a significant contribution to critical theory in general and to psychoanalytically informed cultural criticism in particular. In many respects, it will prove to be a landmark study. . . . The End of Mourning is an extensive, brilliant, and brilliantly executed exposition of a complex and challenging theoretical and historical argument: that twentieth-century culture and thought has been impoverished—in spite of a fascination and indeed obsession with all things historical—by refusal to consider the implications of Freud's emphasis on mourning as a proper way of relating to the past." —Ulrich Baer,New York University

From the Publisher