The book tackles the challenging theme of death as seen through the lens of literature and its connections with history, the visual arts, anthropology, philosophy and other fields in humanities. It searches for answers to three questions: what can we know about death; how is death socialised; and how and for which purposes is death aesthetically shaped? Unlike many other publications, the volume does not endorse the fallacy of over-simplifying death by seeing it either in an exclusively positive light or by reducing it to a purely literary figure. Using literatures potential to stimulate critical thinking, many contemporary stereotypical configurations of death and dying are debunked, and many hitherto unforeseen ways in which death functions as a complex trigger of meaning-making are revealed. The book proves that death is an inexhaustible source of meanings which should be understood as peremptorily plural, discontinuous, problematic, competitive, and often conflictual. It offers original contributions to the field of death studies and also to literary and cultural studies.
Author(s): Adriana Teodorescu
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 302
City: Newcastle upon Tyne
Table of Contents
A Preliminary Interdisciplinary Story of Death and Literature • Adriana Teodorescu
I. Knowing Death: Epistemological and Philosophical Aspects
“The Poems and the Dances of tlie Shades”: Destabilizing Psychological Theories of Grief in The Year of Magical Thinking • Rachel Warner
Displacement of Memory: A Negative Dialectics from Shoah to Alphaville • Aura Poenar
The Duck, the Cat and the Rabbit: Looking at Death in Picture Books for Young Children • Maggie Jackson
Death without Death: Kierkegaard and Cioran about Agony • Ştefan Bolea
Facing Death: A Sartrean Perspective on the Contemporary Tendency to Over-Humanize Death • Adriana Teodorescu
II. Socializing Death: Anthropological and Cultural Dimensions
‘To Keep the Heart Beating ... when Really It Wants to Break’: Uses of Keening in Irish Literature • E. Moore Quinn
Poetic Solutions for Environmental Pollution Caused by Human Bodies Disposal • Alin Rus
Death, the Anthropologist, and Knowledge in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain • Laura Tradii
The Curious Case of Sherlock Holmes’ Death • Marise Chartrand
The Protagonist Does Not Die Anymore: Examining Narratives of Closure in Popular Culture of Saudi Arabia • Maha Zeini al-Saati
III. Shaping Death: Aesthetic Dimensions
Fellini’s Death • Kevin Kopelson
The Dance of Death from Salome to Mata Hari • Florina Codreanu
Pierre Jean Jouve, a Grieving Poet • Tess Grousson
Death and Creation in Three Little Pigs • VU Cong Minh
Prolegomena to an Æsthetics of Decay • Marie-Pierre Krück
Contributors
Index
