Acute Melancholia and Other Essays

Carolyn Dinshaw, New York University:
Hollywood makes far-reaching interventions into medieval studies, philosophy, theology, religious studies, feminist and queer studies, and psychoanalysis in this bracing collection of essays. But in my view her most profound thinking concerns critique itself: her insistence that its sources include not only sorrow and anger but also joy is a proposition that could, indeed, lead to lives more fully lived.

Thomas A. Lewis, Brown University:
Hollywood's essays deftly navigate and bring into fruitful connection an astounding range of literatures—from Medieval Christianity, anthropology, historiography, feminist theory, and philosophy of religion. They demonstrate what philosophy of religion can learn from careful historical work and why historical work requires critical self-consciousness of a sort that philosophical analysis brings. The prose is learned, sensitive, elegant, and precise; and the result is a major contribution to theorizing central topics in the study of religion as well as the humanities more generally—from practice to experience to sexuality. Acute Melancholia and Other Essays deserves broad and repeated reading.

E. Ann Matter, University of Pennsylvania:
Amy Hollywood is the rare scholar who is equally at home with medieval spiritual texts and modern critical theory. These essays that span her career show her virtuosic reading of complex religious and philosophical texts from the Middle Ages in the light of contemporary theories of reading, history, and sexuality. This collection offers delightful and informative reading for anyone interested in medieval Christianity.

Michael Cobb, University of Toronto:
Acute Melancholia and Other Essays will be an essential resource for teachers, students, and all sorts of readers inside and outside of religious studies. Hollywood carefully and meticulously occupies the arguments of so many different thinkers from a wide variety of fields. She invites everyone to her seminar table, and suddenly whole avenues of inquiry unfold tantalizingly before you. Her work, in other words, is not only excellent and exciting—it is also inspiring and provoking.

Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley:
Amy Hollywood's Acute Melancholia and Other Essays is a brilliant and challenging text that asks us all to read religious sources more carefully and productively as we try to fathom the contemporary meaning of critique, the ethical relations that bind us within an unfathomable horizon of loss. Known for her incisive and persuasive work in feminist religious studies, Hollywood takes us into new regions of theory and history by affirming the complex genres in which we think, the pervasive function of ritual within accounts of speech acts and symbolic actions, and the animated histories of metaphor and image. This book prompts us to think critically not only about conceits of the secular that are purified of religious content but also forms of psychoanalysis that discount Freud's writings on religion at a profound cost. The challenge delivered here is to become more capacious thinkers, to attend to ethical demands without a fugitive recourse to the narcissism of imagination, and to encounter the limits of what we can know about what we have lost—or have yet to lose. At that limit emerges an ethical demand that allows us to think beyond the narrow divisions of genre and discipline that stop us from engaging in living thought.