Composite review of Sandy, Mark. Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (original) (raw)
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Poetry, drama and the novel present readers and viewers with emotionally significant situations that they often experience as moving, and their being so moved is one of the principal motivations for engaging with fictions. If emotions are considered as action-prompting beliefs about the environment, the appetite for sad or frightening drama and literature is difficult to explain, insofar nothing tragic or frightening is actually happening to the reader, and people do not normally enjoy being sad or frightened. The paper argues that the somewhat limited and problematic epistemological framework for dealing with the question of fiction-induced emotions has been enhanced by a better empirical understanding of the role of the emotions in social animals and in our individual hedonic economies, as well as by a more generous philosophical assessment of what counts as 'real'. Literary works can be understood further as monuments to experiences of loss that memorialize the highly pleasurable attachments associated with them. The term 'poet' in the title of this article refers to the literary artist in general, following the usual translation of the term in Freud's essay, 'The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming'. 1 Its subject matter is the 'Anna Karenina problem', the 'paradox of car-ing', which has a double aspect. 2 First, the mode of generation and ontological status of literature-generated emotions remains contentious; there is no general agreement on whether we can actually care about things that never happened and people who never existed. Second, the pleasurable nature of the aesthetic experiences of grief, fear, anxiety, and other negative emotions remains puzzling, in the absence of better elucidation of the psychological mechanisms allegedly at work in catharsis or aesthetic distancing. Grief has meanwhile been undertheorized by philosophers. This is understandable. To the philosopher, the salient phenomena are attachment, the building and maintenance of social bonds, and cooperative activities. Moral and political philosophy have much to say about care, community, responsibility to others, and related topics. Neglect, secession, and aban-donment attract less attention, for it is hard to talk about that which is not. Yet we recognize that emotional life consists of cycles of attachment and loss and that their evolutionary roots are deep and wide. 3 Friends drift away or move away, and we replace them with new friends; the children whose needs structured our lives grow up and move out so as to have children of their own; we tear up the hearts of others and get our own torn up too. Ordinary conversation testifies to the centrality of these attachments and losses in people's lives.
Loss and Mourning: Writings on Death and its Appeal to the Reader 1
2020
Abstract. How do writers deal with loss and mourning? Which response do they hope to evoke from their readers? In the absence of any mourners, Scott Fitzgerald himself takes up the role of prime mourner in The Great Gatsby. Proust prefers to immerse the reader in countless memories of his grandmother's death. Thus he and the reader arrive at the idea of his own imminent death. Joyce emphasizes that death really is the appropriate response to life here and now, however happy it might seem. Finally, in my own 'death novel' I endeavour to detach the reader from the experience of loss and mourning. Instead, by using the first person singular narrator, the reader is made to see and experience the beauty of death. As the body of the boy is slowly hauled from the frozen lake, the onlookers drop to their knees one by one. They cross themselves and pray for the eternal life of the soul of this young boy. The last person to kneel and cross himself is the boy's father. He i...
Loss and Mourning: Writings on Death and its Appeal to the Reader
2006
How do writers deal with loss and mourning? Which response do they hope to evoke from their readers? In the absence of any mourners, Scott Fitzgerald himself takes up the role of prime mourner in The Great Gatsby. Proust prefers to immerse the reader in countless memories of his grandmother’s death. Thus he and the reader arrive at the idea of his own imminent death. Joyce emphasizes that death really is the appropriate response to life here and now, however happy it might seem. Finally, in my own ‘death novel’ I endeavour to detach the reader from the experience of loss and mourning. Instead, by using the first person singular narrator, the reader is made to see and experience the beauty of death. As the body of the boy is slowly hauled from the frozen lake, the onlookers drop to their knees one by one. They cross themselves and pray for the eternal life of the soul of this young boy. The last person to kneel and cross himself is the boy’s father. He is a self-acknowledged atheist,...
Poetry of Lost Loss: a Study of the Modern Anti-Consolatory Elegy
2011
This dissertation analyzes the absence of consolation in modern elegies through the phenomenon of “lost loss”: a feeling that a specific loss is either absent, ineffectual, or itself lost, or has become a stand-in or screen for something else. Poetry of lost loss simulates a mood more aptly described as one of a subdued, causeless, chronic “dysthymia”: when the loss is itself lost and is felt only as a dysthymic trace, the notion of mourning becomes obsolete, since there is nothing left to be mourned for except a faint echo of undefined dispossession. To investigate the origin of this obsolescence, Chapter 1 studies how William Wordsworth’s later poems and Essays upon Epitaphs regard elegies as necessary fictions. Chapter 2 hypothesizes that Wallace Stevens’s creation of the fictive “mythology” in his allegorical elegies unveils the loss of loss, and suggests that the function of elegy is less to mourn and console than to attempt to locate an unplaced feeling of equivocal loss through its exploratory utterances. Using these core concepts—how the loss of loss leads to a creation of a fictive, makeshift expressive medium similar to what Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok call a “phantom” in The Shell and the Kernel—Chapter 3 surveys various forms of lost loss in Theodore Roethke’s generic elegies, John Berryman’s Dream Songs, and Sylvia Plath’s poems of 1963. Chapter 4 reads Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III as a case of an anxiety over the prospect of lost loss. In conclusion, the dissertation observes that, in the dysthymia of lost loss, a loss would be left unrecognized until the elegy constructs the fact of the loss and adds a linguistic shape to it. To capture such elusive traces of privation, elegists create phantoms—like Stevens’s sarcophagus allegory or Roethke’s imaginary Aunt Tilly—to forge figurations for vague dejections. In the dismal catastrophe of reality, one finds a way to live in the world of imagination: the poetic forgery of loss is a product of this dysthymic lost loss.
Book Review Facing Loss and Death. Narrative and Eventfulness in Lyric Poetry
Language and Literature 27(2) 142-145 While there are plenty of insightful analyses on single poetic texts inside and outside the realm of stylistics, the sustained, comparative, systematic critical works done on poetry can be counted on fingers. Within the Anglophone world, Michael Riffaterre's now classic Semiotics of Poetry (1978), Brian McHale's work on postmodernist long poems (2004), Nigel Fabb's work on the formal universals of poetry (2015) and Jonathan Culler's theory of the lyric (2015) stand out as luminous exceptions against an undisputable majority of extended studies on narrative fiction.