Nostalgia is often described as a type of melancholy. In fact, both were associated at different points in history with pathology, withdrawal from the here and now, and the cultivation of aesthetic and moral sensibility. This course will explore to what extent nostalgia and melancholy have been linked, intertwined, and confused in contemporary literature, as well as to what extent a categorical distinction between them is justifiable today.

To provide a basis for our investigations, we will survey the culturally diverse history of the discourse about melancholy and its cultural and medical varieties – melancholia, lovesickness, spleen, depression… – and juxtapose it with the discursive trajectory of nostalgia: its scientific problematization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a nosological category (severe homesickness rendering soldiers unfit for service, which would be given different political significance and uses up well into the twentieth century); its sociocultural treatment in European thought of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (influenced by Romanticism and industrial capitalism); its role in totalitarian ideologies of the early twentieth century; its subsequent emergence as a politicized cultural phenomenon in the 1970s; and its more recent, largely depoliticized, commercial use (“retro marketing”), with some notable exceptions (nostalgia for imperialism, communism, fascism, or their elements).

The immediate goal of this course is to reflect on, and try to define, the changing value of nostalgia and melancholy in modern culture. We live in what has been dubbed the Age of Depression, a disempowering conception of pervasive states of sadness that contrasts with the intellectual and creative Age of Melancholy of the English Baroque period – of which Hamlet, the “Melancholy Dane,” is the most famous expression. Nostalgia, on the other hand, is becoming even more present in the cultural sector and in advertising, whether in film and television remakes, retro musical styles and blast from the pasts, or the latest Apple gadget. We will also contextualize our discussion within the recent “affective turn” in cultural theory and history.