num_pages: 278
description: In Depression: A Public Feelings Project Ann Cvetkovich seeks to understand why intellectuals activists professionals and other privileged people struggle with feelings of hopeless and self-loathing. She focuses particularly on those in academia where the pressure to succeed and the desire to find space for creative thinking and alternative worlds bump up against the harsh conditions of a ruthlessly competitive job market the shrinking power of the humanities and the corporatization of the university. In her candid memoir Cvetkovich describes what it was like to move through the days as she finished her dissertation started a job and then completed a book for tenure. Turning to critical essay she seeks to create new forms of writing and knowledge that dont necessarily follow the usual methods of cultural critique but instead come from affective experience ordinary life and alternative archives. Across its different sections including the memoir the book crafts  and its no accident that crafting is one of its topics -- a cultural analysis that can adequately represent depression not as medical pathology but as a historical category a felt experience and a point of entry onto discussions not only about theory and contemporary culture but about how to live.Ann Cvetkovich is Ellen C. Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas Austin. She is the author of An Archive of Feelings: Trauma Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures also published by Duke University Press and Mixed Feelings: Feminism Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism; a coeditor of Political Emotions; and a former editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.Like all my favorite bands Ann Cvetkovich disregards trends in favor of fearlessness. While tackling the tough issues of today she still gives us a book that feels totally timeless. Depression: A Public Feeling fills a gap that has morphed into a crater. The book is as invaluable as it is enjoyable. I found myself sighing throughout thinking 'Phew someone finally said that!'Kathleen Hanna of the bands Le Tigre Bikini Kill and the Julie RuinA provocative addition to Ann Cvetkovich's eloquent writings on the archives of public feelings this book takes depression out of the space of the private into the complex politics of our time. Weaving together memoir cultural and medical history and literary and theoretical discussion Cvetkovich experiments with and reflects on unconventional ways of writing about embodiment cognition and affect. Along the way she offers myriad prescriptions small and large on how to cope with the daily effects of depression and how to heal the world.Marianne Hirsch author of The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust
language: English
title: Depression: A Public Feeling
publisher: Duke University Press Books