The Melancholia of Class
A Manifesto for the Working Class
Published on 13. July 2021
220 pages
978-1-913462-27-7 (ISBN)
Description
What does it mean to be working-class in a middle-class world? Cynthia Cruz shows us how class affects culture and our mental health and what we can do about it -- calling not for assimilation, but for annihilation.
In The Melancholia of Class, Cynthia Cruz describes with clarity and precision what class is, its various and often nuanced manifestations, and the violence it inflicts upon the working-class while, simultaneously articulating an alternative to assimilation, which can only mean annihilation.
Utilizing Freud's concept of melancholia as a starting point, Cruz examines working-class writers, artists, filmmakers and musicians, looking at the melancholia that ensues when the working-class subject leaves her working-class origins to "become someone," only to find that she loses herself in the process.
In The Melancholia of Class, Cynthia Cruz describes with clarity and precision what class is, its various and often nuanced manifestations, and the violence it inflicts upon the working-class while, simultaneously articulating an alternative to assimilation, which can only mean annihilation.
Utilizing Freud's concept of melancholia as a starting point, Cruz examines working-class writers, artists, filmmakers and musicians, looking at the melancholia that ensues when the working-class subject leaves her working-class origins to "become someone," only to find that she loses herself in the process.
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07/2021
Repeater Books
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Person
Cynthia Cruz is the author of six collections of poems: Dregs, How the End Begins, Wunderkammer, The Glimmering Room, Ruin, and Guidebooks for the Dead. Disquieting: Essays on Silence, a collection of critical essays on marginalization and silence, was published by Book*hug in 2019. Her first work of fiction, a novella, Steady Diet of Nothing, is forthcoming. She teaches at the City College of New York and in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University.
