Mourning Becomes Us – The Shrine Re-Membered in Alice Oswald’s Memorial (2012) and Paul Muldoon’s Maggot (2010) (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Poetics and Politics of Mourning
eSocial Sciences, 2020
In the age of publicized mourning and the appropriation of death for grand and often seedy spectacles, the interest in ways of dying has found repeated sparking points. Yet we see how some deaths find no resonance, almost as though there is no need to mourn them, being disposable lives and ungrievable deaths.
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,...
Remnants of the dead and demands on the living: enduring grief through artistic endeavour
In this project I explore the realities of grief through personal experiences and artistic practice. My research considers how remaining objects and memories of the deceased are interconnected and can be re-imagined as artworks to deepen commemoration. It also explores an acceptance of the inevitability of one’s own death, and considers impacts on loved ones still living. The result of this project is a moving image work and a collection of sculptures. I also propose the use of artificial grottoes as spaces that invite viewers to contemplate loss of life and confront their own mortality. Contextual research draws on the work of contemporary artists dealing with death. The video works of Sophie Calle and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook are particularly discussed in relation to my moving image work, 1 million years. When recounting the death of my brother-in-law, I consider an installation work by Tracy Emin and reflect on a photographic series by Anne Noble. Sculptural works by Mike Kelley and Callum Morton are examined in relation to artificial grottoes as devotional spaces. My art practice has also been informed by Martin Heidegger’s philosophical notion of Dasein as a way of accepting all the possibilities in life, including death. Progressive discourse regarding death, including alternative funeral rites and ways of dying, is still in its infancy in Western societies. However, talking about death is increasingly becoming less taboo. Over the course of this project, a methodological opportunity for information sharing at Death Café events has been invaluable. While questioning societal concerns with death, this project acknowledges that the conversation currently rests in a transitional space anticipating further development. My final series of works, together with this exegesis, contributes to this conversation on death and memorial through the medium of visual art.
Piety, Poetry, and the Funeral Sermon: Reading Graveyard Poetry in the Eighteenth Century
English Studies, 2011
Eighteenth-century “graveyard poetry”, as a literary category, has been a problematic one at best. Modern studies of graveyard poetry are restricted to the footnotes of larger traditions, afflicted by a combination of formal and aesthetic codes that fail to fully validate its generic and taxonomic differentiation. This essay presents graveyard poetry as a historically embedded poetic mode, and demonstrates how it can be viewed as a specific experimental response to the intersection of evolving reading, religious and poetic practices of the early to mid-eighteenth century. This revision reads graveyard poetry alongside changing religious practices that appear to mark discernable shifts from collective to individual modes of religious experience, and from public to private forms of devotion. Moreover, it suggests that graveyard poetry was an ideal alternate didactic medium to the declining printed funeral sermon, able to aesthetically facilitate private meditation upon death via affective and subjective response.
2013
In this thesis I explore the contemporary grief memoir, an increasingly popular subset within the autobiography genre, and one that primarily concerns authors' subjective recollections and responses to the rupture in the fabric of their lives caused by the death of an intimate other-typically a spouse, parent or child. In my exegesis I examine Joan Didion's grief memoir-The Year of Magical Thinking (2011 [2005])written in the year following the sudden death of her husband of forty years and fellow writer, John Dunne, and the concurrent serious illness and hospitalisation of their adult daughter, Quintana, in 2004. In particular I analyse how Didion's memoir addresses the rupturing of her reflexive individuality and especially her dispositional orientation and idealization of an agentic, informed and progressive self as key components of her self-identity. In my creative non-fiction writing-Walking Grieved: a mediation of love, loss & memory-I explore the rupture and my responses occasioned by the death of my wife in 2003. I specifically reflect on how this has impacted on my romantic, familial and other self-identities and on my understandings of the constructs (social, historical and subjective) of intimate love, dying and death, memory, enduring grief, elective sociality and the narrations of self and other. Contemporary grief narratives represent an emerging body of literary work and socio-psychological theorizing that contests the 'denial of death' (Ariès 2008 [1981]: 559) ethos prevalent in modern Western societies. They also contest the equally prevalent Freudian model of pathological grief that asserts survivors need to 'move on' from grieving to form new intimate attachments, ideally within months (Dennis 2008; Neimeyer et al 2001). These memoirs represent a contemporary, even postmodern, form of ars moriendi and promote varied forms of 'textured recovery' (Prodromou 2012: 57) that are based on subjective, nuanced and eclectic grieving processes and outcomes. These include highly personal searches for understanding and comprehension of the death, of rupture and grieving, and the fashioning of post-rupture identities, ideas, values and practices that frequently incorporate the deceased and which span a range of themes-restorative, evaluative, interpretive, affirmative, affective, transformative (Dennis 2008). As a form of autobiography, grief memoirs also address issues of self-identity as a series of constantly evolving narratives or stories that individuals tell about themselves and which, in feedback loop, both generate and reflect the evolving modalities and ethics of autobiography (Eakin 1999, 2008). Narrated self-identity is always period and socio-culturally specific. For the middle-classes and higher social strata of post-industrial societies, self-identity therefore routinely coalesces around the hegemony and practices 'reflexive individuality' (Beck 2002: 3)-especially the ideals of agentic, knowledgeable, I warmly acknowledge the constant, proactive support and astute guidance of my supervisor, Dr Ingrid Horrocks, and likewise the generous input of my fellow MCW students and Massey University's English lecturers during the residential course. To Dr Samantha Lentle-Keenan, I warmly thank you for your critical reading of early drafts of my creative, non-fiction scribblings and for many enlightening discussions on dying and death. To Carla Rey Vasquez, I thank you for your superb friendship and for your supportive, perceptive reading and editing of both my exegesis and creative writing. And to Corinna Howland, I thank you for being a wonderful daughter, an exemplary sister to your brother Estlin, and also for your constructive and critical support, reading and editing of my thesis throughout. Most of all, I acknowledge the love and passion of my late wife Karen. Clearly this work exists because of you as my life and my enrichment-for you my darling. R.I.P.
The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature, 2020
Abstract & Contents Page: The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature seeks to understand the ways in which literature has engaged deeply with the ever-evolving relationship humanity has with its ultimate demise. It is the most comprehensive collection in this growing field of study and includes essays by Brian McHale, Catherine Belling, Ronald Schleifer, Helen Swift, and Ira Nadel, as well as the work of a generation of younger scholars from around the globe, who bring valuable transnational insights. Encompassing a diverse range of mediums and genres – including biography and autobiography, documentary, drama, elegy, film, the novel and graphic novel, opera, picturebooks, poetry, television, and more – the contributors offer a dynamic mix of approaches that range from expansive perspectives on particular periods and genres to extended analyses of select case studies. Essays are included from every major Western period, including Classical, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and so on, right up to the contemporary. This collection provides a telling demonstration of the myriad ways that humanity has learned to live with the inevitability of death, where “live with” itself might mean any number of things: from consoling, to memorializing, to rationalizing, to fending off, to evading, and, perhaps most compellingly of all, to escaping. Engagingly written and drawing on examples from around the world, this volume is indispensable to both students and scholars working in the fields of medical humanities, thanatography (death studies), life writing, Victorian studies, modernist studies, narrative, contemporary fiction, popular culture, and more. Table of Contents Introduction PART I Traversing the Ontological Divide – Introduction The Final Frontier: Science Fictions of Death – Brian McHale "Still I Danced": Performing Death in Ford’s The Broken Heart – Donovan Sherman Death and the Margins of Theatre in Luigi Pirandello – Daniel K. Jernigan Forbidden Mental Fruit? Dead Narrators and Characters from Medieval to Postmodernist Narratives – Jan Alber Literature and the Afterlife – Alice Bennett The Novel as Heartbeat: The Dead Narrator in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones – Neil Murphy Dead Man/and Woman Talking: Narratives from Beyond the Grave – Philippe Carrard The View from Upstream: Authority and Projection in Fontenelle’s Nouveaux dialogues des morts – Jessica Goodman PART II Genres – Introduction Big Questions: Re-Visioning and Re-Scripting Death Narratives in Children’s Literature – Lesley D. Clement In the U-Bend with Moaning Myrtle: Thinking about Death in YA Literature – Karen Coats Death and Mourning in Graphic Narrative – José Alaniz Death and Documentaries: Heuristics for the Real in an Age of Simulation – Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter Death and the Fanciulla – Reed Way Dasenbrock Death, Literary Form, and Affective Comprehension: Primary Emotions and the Neurological Basis of Genre – Ronald Schleifer PART III Site, Space, and Spatiality – Introduction Ecocide and the Anthropocene: Death and the Environment – Flore Coulouma A Disney Death: Coco, Black Panther, and the Limits of the Afterlife – Stacy Thompson Suicide in the Early Modern Elegiac Tradition – Kelly McGuire Institutions and Elegies: Viewing the Dead in W. B. Yeats and John Wieners – Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh Death "after Long Silence": Auditing Agamben’s Metaphysics of Negativity in Yeats’s Lyric – Samuel Caleb Wee The Spatialization of Death in the Novels of Virginia Woolf – Ian Tan "Memento Mori": memory, Death, and Posterity in Singapore’s Poetry – Jen Crawford PART IV Rituals, Memorials, and Epitaphs – Introduction Death and the Dead in Verse Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece – Arianna Gullo Fictional Will – Helen Swift Monumentalism, Death, and Genre in Shakespeare – John Tangney Death and Gothic Romanticism: Dilating in/upon the Graveyard, Meditating among the Tombs – Carol Margaret Davison Death, Literature, and the Victorian Era – Jolene Zigarovich The Aura of the Phonographic Relic: Hearing the Voices of the Dead – Angela Frattarola Anecdotal Death: Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets – Laura Davies Biography: Life after Death – Ira Nadel PART V Living with Death: Writing, Mourning, and Consolation – Introduction "An immense expenditure of energy come to nothing": Philosophy, Literature, and Death in Peter Weiss’s Abschied von den Eltern – Christopher Hamilton Paradox, Death, and the Divine – Jamie Lin Inner Seeing and Death Anxiety in Aidan Higgins’s Blind Man’s Bluff and Other Life Writing – Lara O’Muirithe Autothanatography and Contemporary Poetry – Ivan Callus When Time Stops: Death and Autobiography in Contemporary Personal Narratives – Rosalía Baena "Grief made her insubstantial to herself": Illness, Aging, and Death in A. S. Byatt’s Little Black Book of Stories – Graham Matthews PART VI Historical Engagements – Introduction On the Corpse of a Loved One in the Era of Brain Death: Bioethics and Fictions – Catherine Belling Death to the Music of Time: Reticence in Anthony Powell’s Mediated Narratives of Death – Catherine Hoffmann Death and Chinese War Television Dramas: (Re)configuring Ethical Judgments in The Disguiser – W. Michelle Wang Where Do the Disappeared Go? Writing the Genocide in East Timor – Kit Ying Lye "Doubtfull Drede": Dying at the End of the Middle Ages – Walter Wadiak Urbanization, Ambiguity, and Social Death in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn – Wanlin Li 42. Coda – Julian Gough
Otherwise Occupied: Poetry Between Dying and Dying
2012
This anniversary of John Donne’s death (31 March), approaching at a time occupied by occupations of one public space after another in the name of (almost) everybody, marks an appropriate moment for reflection on fear and religion by way of poetry. Donne’s career, before and after his ordination, is a life in poetry poised between love and death – or, more properly, in love, in medias res, eye to eye with death in the arc (as Doris Humphrey suggested) between dying and dying. In his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx characterized religion as “the general theory of this world,” inverted, as he understood it, because the state in which we live is upside down. A general theory of a world is a product of that world, but it is also a vision of the whole of that world articulated by one acting in it as a theorist, inside standing as though out. In a time and place marked by pervasive feelings of impending danger identified with death and politics, Donne embraced poetry as a sacramental act affirming the real presence of love. At a time when those feelings are familiar, that is where I propose to begin – not with a paper on Donne but, taking Donne as an exemplar, with a brief essay in what can be done in poetry in medias res to nurture a res publica that is not twisted by fear toward violence.