COML 2552

From Black Bile to Digital Depression:The History of Melancholy in Medicine, Philosophy, Art, Media

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2024-2025.

Throughout Western history, the nature of melancholy (aka "depression," its modern counterpart) has both inspired and baffled philosophers, doctors, artists, and writers. Compared to other ailments, affects, or conditions, this mysterious sadness has provoked a proliferation of concepts, theories, therapies, and artworks. This seminar offers a comparative survey of discourses on melancholy/depression and their related ideological, social, aesthetic, and scientific issues, from the Ancient Greeks onwards. We will focus on the ways in which melancholy/depression has been theorized in medicine, theology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, ethnography, philosophy, and ecology; on how its shifting forms are related to issues of politics, society, culture, race, and gender; and on the many modes through which it has been file and expressed in literature, visual art, music, and today's social media.

When Offered Spring.

Distribution Category (ETM-AS) (KCM-AG)

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