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4712P BOSNIA-PT/bp.qxd 6/12/06 15:04 Page 126 7 Mourning It is always the other who saw with an eye that was too natural, too carnal, too external, which is to say, too literal.1 Judith Butler argues that our opacity to ourselves is precisely the condition upon which an ethic of responsibility can be formed. It is the inherent fragmentation of the subject, the inability of the self to provide a thorough accounting of who or what one is, the sense that we are only ever partially knowable to ourselves, and that even this partiality is shrouded in
. However, the poem also identifies memory as playing a key role in establishing the ‘reality’ of a life that was lived. Memory, and its claim on the subject, has an uneasy, because unstable, presence in the late eighteenth century as its links to authenticity are challenged by constructions of mourning and models of writing. 1 This chapter begins with an account of memory during the
3 Sir Thopas’s mourning maidens Helen Cooper Ful many a mayde, bright in bour, They moorne for hym paramour, Whan hem were bet to slepe; But he was chaast and no lechour.1 The tale of Sir Thopas that the pilgrim Chaucer tells on the road to Canterbury was designed to delight the widest possible range of readers or listeners. The romances that it parodies, adventure stories written in the stanzaic form of tail-rhyme, were widely known across England, and to a broad social range.2 Chaucer’s imitation is an apparently unsophisticated tale written for a
play where the emphasis falls squarely on action and event, although this work possesses its own complex mode of representation. In the folio version, recollection is granted great scope and complexity; it becomes, in short, a ‘memory play’. Furthermore, memory also takes on a sorrowful quality constituting, in significant part, the act of mourning. It is best understood, I will
4 Conservatism and mourning the nation It will seem odd that a survey of nationalism’s ideological presentation has not yet engaged its more formal conservative legacies. After all, contemporary nationalism is commonly reduced in popular analysis to being merely an unreconstructed conservatism, one that is nestled in the crusty recesses of boorish, right-wing politics. As has hopefully been made apparent in the preceding chapters, the reality is very different. Nationalism necessarily sources the entire political spectrum when assembling its ideological language
Based on the anthropological classification of death into ‘good deaths’, ‘beautiful deaths’ and ‘evil deaths’, and using the methodology of screen ethnography, this article focuses on mourning in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially the extreme cases of deaths in Manaus and among the Yanomami people. The article ‘follows the virus’, from its first role in a death in the country, that of a domestic worker, to hurriedly dug mass graveyards. I consider how the treatment of bodies in the epidemiological context sheds light on the meanings of separation by death when mourning rituals are not performed according to prevailing cultural imperatives. Parallels are drawn with other moments of sudden deaths and the absence of bodies, as during the South American dictatorships, when many victims were declared ‘missing’. To conclude, the article focuses on new funerary rituals, such as Zoom funerals and online support groups, created to overcome the impossibility of mourning as had been practised in the pre-pandemic world.
90 5 Edmund Spenser’s The Ruines of Time as a Protestant poetics of mourning and commemoration Isabel Karremann I have completed a memorial more lasting than bronze and higher than the royal grave of the pyramids. Horace, Odes, Book 3, Ode 30 According to Horace, the poem is a memorial surpassing the commemorative function of funeral monuments like the pyramids. This claim to the superior mnemonic power of poetry derives from the immateriality and consequently, the argument goes, the immortality of the poem as well as the person commemorated by it. The
This article reviews the exhibition _Gothic: Dark Glamour_, held at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, September 5 2008 – February 21 2009. It also considers the eponymous volume published alongside the exhibition by Valerie Steele and Jennifer Park. The exhibition was the first of international significance to identify and explore the influence of Gothic on contemporary fashion by both major label designers and small subcultural producers. The article hails the exhibition as a landmark event and investigates the various Gothic/fashion narratives it,puts forward, including veiling motifs, subcultural style, grotesque and perverse bodies, and the prevalence of British and Japanese design. The article concludes that the exhibition marks a moment in the glamorisation of the Gothic, in which it moves from being a minority to a mainstream interest.
This article examines the prevalence of Gothic in contemporary culture and criticism. It suggests that the description Gothic’ has become widespread in the aftermath of Derrida‘s work Spectres of Marx and that this threatens to undermine Gothics usefulness as a critical category. In examining contemporary culture it identifies the notions of trauma and mourning in the popular imagination as having contributed to a condition where Gothic no longer expresses the anxiety of the fragmented subject, but reaches towards a valorisation of damaged subjectivity.
This article describes the operational practices of the city morgue in Santiago, Chile and their effects on the family members who come to claim the bodies of their loved ones. It explores the impact of the body‘s passage through the morgue on the observance of rituals surrounding death and mourning. An underlying conflict can be identified between the states partial appropriation of and interference with the body and intrinsic needs associated with the performance of funeral rites in accordance with cultural and religious precepts.