The Counterliteracy of Postmelancholy

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes locates a type of melancholy in the still image of photography that is missing in the moving pictures of cinema. This essay uncovers the complicated depiction of freedom and fantasy in the film Precious and the novel Push, and the complicated role of pleasure in certain responses to the film. Analysis of the fantastical aspects in the novel and the film reveals a counterliteracy of the oppressed (a breaking out of the expected melancholy).