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Melancholia is marked by two competing tendencies: on the one hand, it clings to the objects of this world as if they could provide a path to transcendence and, on the other, it recognizes the weight of these objects, their transience, and concomitant senselessness. This course will examine the melancholic disposition from Robert Burton’s 1621 tome The Anatomy of Melancholy onward to Martin Heidegger’s analysis of boredom in Being and Time. We will consider the religious dimensions of melancholia as explored in different contexts by Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg and will pay particular attention to Warburg’s notion of the Pathosformel while reflecting on literary works by Flaubert, Adrian, Chekhov, Hofmannsthal, Musil, Pessoa, Rilke, and W. G. Sebald.