Death within the Text: Social, Philosophical and Aesthetic Approaches to Literature

Description

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. 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