Enriched by the Thousand Darknesses of Deathbringing Speech (original) (raw)
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Introduction: Contemplating Death
Shofar: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Jewish Studies, Special Issue "What's Jewish About Death?", 2021
"There is, of course, nothing particularly Jewish about death, that ultimate universalizing force. But today, several years following the 2018 Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, and in the midst of the 2020 swelling of support for Black Lives Matter, a worldwide activist movement driven by grief, alongside the devastating and still in-progress global Coronavirus pandemic, the puzzles of what Jewishness and Judaism, in their many configurations and iterations, can teach us about death, and what attending closely to death, as well as its close companions, mourning and grief, can teach us about Jewishness and Judaism, have particular urgency. As numerous historians and scholars recognize, it was in times of great upheaval, including around the Crusades and the Black Death, and its attendant massacres, that various now widely recognized Jewish customs and rituals surrounding death, mourning, and memorialization were crystallized. 2 This contemporary moment, then, seems like the right time to rethink what death—and its economic, material, social, ideological, and emotional contexts and circumstances—can mean for Jews and the world around us. This special issue, edited by a sociologist and a literary and visual culture scholar, is not just multidisciplinary but transdisciplinary. It includes essays incorporating scholarly research and methodology culled from Latin@ studies, Rabbinics, film studies, trauma studies, cultural studies, and literary studies. The creative compositions include photography, comics, the short story, poetry, and creative nonfiction writing. By bringing together explorations of Jewish death and loss, sometimes as incontrovertible fact and sometimes as metaphor, sometimes in a communal and sometimes individual sense, from the standpoint of those who have lost and from the standpoint of those afraid of losing, through traditional and secular frameworks, and articulated in a multitude of formats and modalities, we hope this volume, whether held in your hands or scrolled on a screen, will serve as an object of contemplation and curiosity, an instrument for bonding together learning, thinking through, and feeling."
Speaking of the Dead and the Speaking Dead
Journal of American Studies, 2015
Scholars of literary mourning find themselves in an odd position, often taking part in elegy even as they critique it. In her new book Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy, Diana Fuss fully embraces both roles. She offers readers the opportunity to see elegy in action – she notes, “The book itself is as performative as it is purposeful, perhaps comprising its own distinctive form of elegy” (3) – even as she raises new questions about the role of an ancient poetic form in an era of mass media that is, of course, written in prose.
Taming death and the consequences of discourse
2013
Healthcare environments have become increasingly complex, especially around the end of life. As they become more complex, organizational members are often pulled in competing directions as they manage to bring order to what otherwise would be a disorderly world. This extensive ethnographic study of a hospice and an emergency department (ED) critically analyzes the nature of discourse and its resulting accomplishments. I use the notion of 'taming' to describe the way providers talk about and make sense of their work and work environment, and the consequences it has for their own personal well-being, as well as for care around the end of life. The goal is to elucidate how reclaiming struggle and choice over meaning production is needed for healthcare challenges of the 21st century.
In this essay, we attend to the rhetorical and spatio-temporal contours of how the urgency to recognize Black life and aid in struggle is detached from a recognition of the deep structural and ontological nature of antiblackness. We center on two seemingly disparate case studies to unpack these phenomena. First, we look at the state lynching of Breonna Taylor and the multiracial coalition that emerged around #sayhername, and second, we turn to the politics and rhetorics of DEI initiatives on college campuses. Guided by scholars writing on Black life, our project asks how we imagine the physicality of violence in this moment in ways that interrupt common frames of both the physical and the moment. We write at the intersection of two larger rhetorical conversations on racialized violence: stoppage and suffocation, and their respective interests in theories of racialized time. We argue that the variants of anti-Black stoppage and suffocation operate on multiple temporal registers of recognition that perform recognition even as they profit from antiblackness. For rhetorical scholars invested in studies of racial violence, the urgency of the moment should serve as a reminder that possibility lies in the inventional, an inventional that requires a disciplined, intentional, and persistent practice and commitment.
“The Timeless, Unifying Rhetoric of Lamentations.”
Certain poetic features of Lamentations contribute to an ongoing preservative/cohesive function in faith communities. In form and content the reader/audience is confronted with completeness—a nation’s complete destruction, the complete range of human emotion—and with incompleteness—a fragmented people, broken institutions, unanswered theological questions.
Richard Hughes clearly states that the aim of Lament, Death, and Destiny is " to explore ancient traditions of lament, particularly prayers of lament in the Bible, as a resource for Christian theology " (1). As a framework for this exploration he compares and contrasts the notion of providence and the practice of lament throughout history. This forms the basis of the argument that a gradual disappearance of lament has been precipitated by an emphasis on the idea of providence. Hughes states that " One of the purposes of this study is to explore the reasons for a shift from lament to providence and to argue that the neglect of lament has prevented a realistic confrontation with suffering and death. " (xvi) In his preface Richard Hughes paints a vivid picture of his world as a student within the broader world context of the 1960s. As a result his research ostensibly emerged from the socio-cultural milieu of the 1960s and his explorations in the field of philosophy. His major focus became the life and thought of Tillich and his proposal of a polemic between fate and destiny. Hughes argues that scholars, including Tillich, " …lived amid oppressive political regimes, characterized by hostile elements of fate, and they struggled to achieve a sense of freedom beyond theodicy and a theology in which God works out everything for the best. They experienced events working out for the worst. " He also adds that more recent events such as September 11, 2001 have added impetus to the exploration of suffering and death as a response to such traumatic events. In the introduction it is clearly stated that laments are " preconceptual cries of pain and suffering within the context of faith " (1). The significance of this for Hughes' approach cannot be understated. As these ideas are developed it is made clear that lament is not something which is contrived or necessarily thoughtful. It simply is. However, this " preconceptual " cry does have context. Lament is clearly expressed within faith and not outside of it. This forms a foundational premise for Hughes as he argues for the ubiquitous presence of lament from an existential standpoint which is firmly embedded within a framework of religious faith. He argues convincingly from history and literature that the production of laments as this kind of response to trauma, be it personal or public, is abundant. In addition to these ideas the reader is alerted to the narrative nature of lament which acts as a reminder, a validation and helps " to rescue them (traumatic events) from the horror of being forgotten " (5). The language of lament is also highlighted by Hughes as being metaphorical and polysemic in nature, able to accommodate images and symbols which otherwise might not be expressed. Unfortunately he fails at this point to explore the poetic style of the lament language as found particularly in the case of Biblical psalms. Despite this omission he does justifiably highlight the prominent place lament has in the process of grief work for both individuals and groups recovering from traumatic events.
" Some Spirit Was Pursuing All of Us": Literary Perspectives on Death
Senior Honors Papers, 2006
This paper will pursue the theme of death as a transgression against the created order through the works of five authors-the Apostle Paul, William Shakespeare, Alfred Telmyson, Dylan Thomas, and J.R.R. Tolkien-while also providing a brief overview of the perspectives on death presented in each author's writings. The paper will demonstrate that although the five authors treat death with varying degrees of positive and negative tone, often in proportion to the orthodoxy of their Christian beliefs, their writings are in agreement that man was not created to die, and that death should not be spoken or written of lightly.
Chapter 1 Voices and Silences of the Dead in Western Modernity
Articulate Necrographies, 2019
Anthropologists have observed a belief in many hunter gatherer and agricultural societies not only that the dead are aware of the activities of the living but also that the more agentful dead have power to shape the course of events, at least for a time-though the ways such power is manifested are diverse (Straight 2006). A range of scholars have contrasted this with modern western societies, by which I mean primarily Europe, North America and Australia/New Zealand, the focus of this chapter. Here, it has been claimed, the dead are absent, their voices silenced As Baudrillard puts it (1993: 126