English Department

at the University of Michigan-Flint

Melancholy & Memes

Posted by & filed under Student Papers & Projects.

Students, are you feeling isolated, overwhelmed, swamped with reading, and even a little depressed?  Robert Burton, a seventeenth-century writer, working in what he called a “scribbling age,” wrote a massive tome, The Anatomy of Melancholy, to cure his own depression.  His send-up of students and scholars who sit and sit and read and read, neglecting