We will explore the literary uses of melancholy, considering it not as a pensive retreat from history, but as a series of dynamic transactions with it. We will examine a range of conflicting impulses toward a lost past in texts written during periods of political, social, or economic upheaval, whose crises are often figured in the guise of female characters' psychic traumas. In such texts, melancholy provides a logic by which we interpret and represent history, and a mode of social and cultural critique. The course will be divided into three parts: "The Melancholy State," "Hypochondria and the Body Politic," and "Mania and Charisma." Readings will be drawn from Jane Austen's Persuasion, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Vladimir Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and Tony Kushner's Angels in America, as well as poetry by Gray, Keats, and Dickinson. We will also consider representations of the Great Depression in such screwball comedies as My Man Godfrey and Nothing Sacred. Theoretical texts will be drawn from the work of Freud, Melanie Klein, Kristeva, Burke, Marx, Weber and Benjamin. Format: discussion/seminar. Requirements: two 10-page papers or one 20-page paper. Prerequisites: a 100-level English course, except 150. Enrollment limit: 25 (expected: 20). (Criticism or 1700-1900)