Re/Visioning Depression: Creative Approaches to “Feeling Bad” - Call for contributions

[Jill Anderson]

Re/Visioning Depression: Creative Approaches to “Feeling Bad” Edited by Robin Alex McDonald

What is depression? … An “imagined sun, bright and black at the same time?” … A “noonday demon?” … A dead fish? In literature, comics, art, and film, we witness new conceptualizations of depression come into being. Unburdened by diagnostic criteria and pharmaceutical concerns, these media employ imagery, narrative, symbolism, and metaphor to forge imaginative, exploratory, and innovative representations of a range of experiences that might get called “depression.” Texts such as Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989), Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon (2000), Allie Brosh’s cartoons, “Adventures in Depression” (2011) and “Depression Part Two” (2013), and Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011) each offer portraits of depression that deviate from, or altogether reject, the dominant language of depression that has been articulated by and within psychiatry. Most recently, Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling (2012) has answered the author’s own call for a multiplication of discourses on depression by positing crafting as one possible method of working through depression-as-“impasse.”

Inspired by Cvetkovich’s efforts to re-shape and re-imagine both the depressive experience itself and the critical ways in which we communicate this experience to others, this anthology seeks scholarly and creative essays that rescue depression from totalizing psychiatric or psychological frameworks in order to produce new languages of and ways of thinking about depression.

Further details