The Poetics and Politics of Mourning (original) (raw)
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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...
Death, Fantasy, and the Ethics of Mourning
Van Brussel L., Carpentier N. (eds) (2014) The Social Construction of Death. London: Palgrave Macmillan., 2014
Drawing on discourse theory and psychoanalysis this chapter develops a perspective with which to understand and evaluate phenomena associated with death and loss.1 This perspective takes seriously the basic insight of constructionist approaches to the study of social phenomena, namely, that understanding the dynamics of human practices requires acknowledging the key role that meaning and subjectivity play in their stabilisation and transformation (see, for example, Carpentier and Van Brussel, 2012). The particular social constructionist approach developed in this chapter draws on the categories of discourse and contingency, as well as the category of fantasy, stressing the potentially ethical dimension of practices of mourning.
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 2023
This paper explores the relationship of mourning and the gift in the work of Jacques Derrida. I argue that mourning is not a Derridean gift, but mourning does open us to the gift. Reading the works of Aristotle, Cicero, and Kierkegaard on friendship and love to the dead in the wake of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship makes this relation among mourning and the gift apparent for he presents mourning as the opening to a democracy to-come whose logic is the gift. Through these accounts, I maintain that in preparing us for the gift, mourning the dead other can help us to relate better with the living other in ethical, political, and ontological terms.
Current Journal of Applied Science and Technology
The mourning in its instances, references, connections and ties among individuals, the title of this song indicates lack of our foundations, who loves us also rejects and abandon us (Nirvana - Jesus Doesn't Want Me For Sunbeam [1], with these customs we acquire the notion of love and mourning, and it is where the mirror of illusions and reality collide, where human omnipotence, omniscience, and omnivision meet death; It's long been known that in general the brain in its psychic processes does not recognize death, with the psychic structure not to recognize death, and how to understand how these external factors affect our psyche, our psychic structure and the ways one can possibly deal with such feeling within a Freudian psychoanalytic approach, that is, in simple words, the mourning in this intense period, as initially we do not recognize it as reality and have to accept and recognize it in the face of real impotence. Through a psychoanalytic approach this work seeks to fac...
(2017) The changing nature of death and mourning
The paper examines obituaries appearing in the Hungarian daily Népszabadság during the second half of the twentieth century. It argues from a social constructivist stance that the reading of these texts gives us insights about the prevailing norms and values related to death. It posits that the issue of death brings to the surface general cultural values as well. Its aim is to see how these norms and values have changed as the political and social structure changed in Hungary. First, the paper looks at general statistical data regarding obituaries which show a decline in their numbers. Using a topic framework, the elements and the structure of the texts are identified. In a detailed analysis of these elements, the paper examines the questions of authorship, informing, traits, identity, the announcement of death, achievements and the funeral, respectively. The findings put existing theories on the ‘death taboo’ in an empirical context in a number of ways. Instead of signifying a death taboo, metaphorical expressions of death show a secular, demystified but not tabooed relationship towards death in Hungary in the second half of the twentieth century.
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,...