{"id":3117,"date":"2009-04-29T15:55:05","date_gmt":"2009-04-29T19:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/batesviews.net\/?p=3117"},"modified":"2015-06-26T13:24:58","modified_gmt":"2015-06-26T17:24:58","slug":"in-praise-of-melancholy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2009\/04\/29\/in-praise-of-melancholy\/","title":{"rendered":"In Praise of Melancholy author to speak"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Eric<\/a><\/p>\n

Eric G. Wilson, whose 2008 book Against Happiness<\/em> offers a provocative antidote to America’s culture of “happiness at all costs,” visits Bates College to give a talk called “The Power of Melancholy” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 13, in Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.<\/p>\n

Sponsored by the College Lectures Committee, the event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-8296.<\/p>\n

Wilson’s Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy<\/a><\/em> (Sarah Crichton Books\/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) challenges the recent happiness trend and celebrates the meditative virtues of melancholy. “It is inauthentic and shallow, charges Wilson, to relentlessly seek happiness in a world full of tragedy,” wrote a reviewer for Publishers Weekly.<\/p>\n

“While he does not want to romanticize clinical depression, Wilson argues forcefully that melancholia is a necessary ingredient of any culture that wishes to be innovative or inventive. In particular, we need melancholy if we want to make true, beautiful art.”<\/p>\n

The Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest University, Wilson teaches Romantic literature. Prior to Against Happiness,<\/em> he published The Melancholy Android: On the Psychology of Sacred Machines<\/em> (State University of New York Press, 2006), an academic study of the ambiguous relationship between psychology and technology.<\/p>\n

His earlier books focus on relationships between Romanticism and science. Wilson also writes about film, and recently completed a book on cinema and religion, Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film<\/em> (Continuum, 2006), and another on the spiritual qualities of director David Lynch, The Strange World of David Lynch: Transcendental Irony from ‘Eraserhead’ to ‘Mulholland Drive’ <\/em>(Continuum, 2007).<\/p>\n

Wilson has received a variety of awards for his work, including a fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina and the university-wide prize for excellence in research at Wake Forest. He lectures widely on connections between literature and science, and has appeared on Odyssey<\/em>, a daily show produced by Chicago Public Radio, and What’s the Word?<\/em> — a radio show sponsored by the Modern Language Association.<\/p>\n

Wilson holds a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric G. Wilson, whose 2008 book Against Happiness offers a provocative antidote to America’s culture of “happiness at all costs,” visits Bates College to give a talk called “The Power of Melancholy” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 13, in Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,39,179,224],"tags":[3271],"class_list":["post-3117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-life","category-event-highlights","category-language-literature","category-society-culture","tag-english6"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3117"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88727,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3117\/revisions\/88727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}