"Cultures of the Death Drive" is a comprehensive guide to the work
of pioneering psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882-1960) and to
developments in Kleinian theory to date. It is also an analysis and
a demonstration of the distinctive usefulness of Klein's thought
for understanding modernist literature and visual art. Esther
Sanchez-Pardo examines the issues that the seminal discourses of
psychoanalysis and artistic modernism brought to the fore in the
early twentieth century and points toward the uses of Kleinian
thinking for reconceptualizing the complexities of identity and
social relations today.
Sanchez-Pardo argues that the troubled political atmosphere
leading to both world wars created a melancholia fueled by
"cultures of the death drive" and the related specters of object
loss--loss of coherent and autonomous selves, of social orders
where stability reigned, of metaphysical guarantees, and, in some
cases, loss and fragmentation of empire. This melancholia
permeated, and even propelled, modernist artistic discourses.
Sanchez-Pardo shows how the work of Melanie Klein, the theorist of
melancholia par excellence, uniquely illuminates modernist texts,
particularly their representations of gender and sexualities. She
offers a number of readings--of works by Virginia Woolf, Rene
Magritte, Lytton Strachey, Djuna Barnes, and Countee Cullen--that
reveal the problems melancholia posed for verbal and visual
communication and the narrative and rhetorical strategies modernist
artists derived to either express or overcome them. In her
afterword, Sanchez-Pardo explicates the connections between
modernist and contemporary melancholia.
A valuable contribution to psychoanalytic theory, gender and
sexuality studies, and the study of representation in literature
and the visual arts, "Cultures of the Death Drive "is a necessary
resource for those interested in the work of Melanie Klein.
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