Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
The Tears of Things : Melancholy and Physical Objects, Paperback / softback Book

The Tears of Things : Melancholy and Physical Objects Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Only a few left - usually despatched within 24 hours

Description

We surround ourselves with material things that are invested with memories but can only stand for what we have lost.

Physical objects—such as one’s own body—situate and define us; yet at the same time they are fundamentally indifferent to us.

The melancholy of this rift is a rich source of inspiration for artists.

Peter Schwenger deftly weaves together philosophical and psychoanalytical theory with artistic practice.

Concerned in part with the act of collecting, The Tears of Things is itself a collection of exemplary art objects—literary and cultural attempts to control and possess things—including paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and René Magritte; sculpture by Louise Bourgeois and Marcel Duchamp; Joseph Cornell’s boxes; Edward Gorey’s graphic art; fiction by Virginia Woolf, Georges Perec, and Louise Erdrich; the hallucinatory encyclopedias of Jorge Luis Borges and Luigi Serafini; and the corpse photographs of Joel Peter Witkin.

However, these representations of objects perpetually fall short of our aspirations.

Schwenger examines what is left over—debris and waste—and asks what art can make of these.

What emerges is not an art that reassembles but one that questions what it means to assemble in the first place.

Contained in this catalog of waste is that ultimate still life, the cadaver, where the subject-object dichotomy receives its final ironic reconciliation.

Peter Schwenger is professor of English at Mount St.

Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning, Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word, and Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature.

Information

Save 3%

£24.99

£24.09

Only a few left - usually despatched within 24 hours
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information