{"product_id":"the-tears-of-things-melancholy-and-physical-objects","title":"The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects","description":"\u003cp\u003eWe surround ourselves with material things that are invested with memories but can only stand for what we have lost. Physical objectssuch as ones own bodysituate and define us; yet at the same time they are fundamentally indifferent to us. The melancholy of this rift is a rich source of inspiration for artists.  Peter Schwenger deftly weaves together philosophical and psychoanalytical theory with artistic practice. Concerned in part with the act of collecting  The Tears of Things is itself a collection of exemplary art objectsliterary and cultural attempts to control and possess thingsincluding paintings by Georgia OKeeffe and Ren Magritte; sculpture by Louise Bourgeois and Marcel Duchamp; Joseph Cornells boxes; Edward Goreys graphic art; fiction by Virginia Woolf  Georges Perec  and Louise Erdrich; the hallucinatory encyclopedias of Jorge Luis Borges and Luigi Serafini; and the corpse photographs of Joel Peter Witkin.  However  these representations of objects perpetually fall short of our aspirations. Schwenger examines what is left overdebris and wasteand asks what art can make of these. What emerges is not an art that reassembles but one that questions what it means to assemble in the first place. Contained in this catalog of waste is that ultimate still life  the cadaver  where the subject-object dichotomy receives its final ironic reconciliation.  Peter Schwenger is professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax  Nova Scotia. He is the author of Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning  Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word  and Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44950151659573,"sku":"ByrdShop_0816646317","price":226.21,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780816646319.jpg?v=1770098573","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-tears-of-things-melancholy-and-physical-objects","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}