Melancholy, paranoia and miscommunication, and all before lunch

By Meagan Haessig

ROME, April 4 - The idea that “love is always accompanied by its opposite, fear” was discussed in detail on Thursday at a John Cabot University lecture featuring scholar and author Jeremy Tambling of the University of Manchester.

But not just fear, he said; you can add melancholy to the equation, he told students and faculty in JCU's Aula Magna Regina auditorium.  He discussed melancholy and exaggeration in literature with references to German sociologist Theodor Adorno and Sigmund Freud. 

 

Tambling moved to the University of Manchester from a position as chair of Comparative Literature in Hong Kong.  He spoke at JCU of his ideas concerning melancholia and how it is linked with exaggeration.  The audience listened attentively as Tambling discussed Adorno’s speculation between “paranoia or true to reality” exaggeration in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. 

Tambling read a lengthy paper about his interest in modernistic contexts coinciding with the idea of mourning and melancholy.  He cited different examples of the “kinship of melancholy and exaggeration” and Freud’s idea that the mourning can be psychoanalytically defined as “object loss . These ideas, he noted, are from Fraud’s Mourning and Melancholia.

The lecture was followed by a Q&A and lunch. Much of the crowd seemed very impressed by his ideas and challenged Tambling with many insightful questions. He then summed up with an idea to ponder:  “Language is excess and is communicated on accident.”

The topics of melancholy, paranoia and the ineffectiveness of language was well received. A nice applause concluded the discussion.