Mourning Modernism Postmodernism

Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism traces the emergence of a fundamentally new way of writing about individual and collective mourning, demonstrating how a refusal of consolation and closure succeeds in promoting a progressive cultural politics crucial for reimaging gender, racial, and sexual subjects.

This book examines the writing of catastrophe, mass death, and collective loss in twentieth-century literature and criticism. With particular focus on texts by Woolf, Benjamin, and Sebald, it engages the century's preoccupation with world-ending, a mixed rhetoric of totality and rupture, finitude and survival, the end and its posthumous remainders. The spectacle of world-ending proliferates as a form of desire, an ambivalent compulsion to consume and outlive the end of all. In conversation with discussions of the century's passionfor the real, the author reads the century's obsession with negative forms of ending and outcome. Drawing connections between current interest in trauma and the sublime, she reframes the terms of the modernist experiment and its aesthetics from the lens of a late sublime

The essays in Modernism and Mourning examine the work of mourning in modernist literature, or more precisely, its propensity for resisting this work. Drawing from recent developments in the theory and cultural history of mourning, its contributors explore the various ways in which modernist writers repudiate Freud's famous injunction to mourners to work through their grief, endorsing instead a resistant, or melancholic mourning that shapes both their themes and their radical experiments with form. The emerging picture of the pervasive influence of melancholic mourning in modernist literature casts new light on longstanding critical arguments, especially those about the politics of modernism. It also makes clear the pertinence of this literature to the present day, in which the catastrophic losses of 9/11, of retaliatory war, of racially motivated genocide, of the AIDS epidemic, have made the work of mourning a subject of widespread interest and debate. Patricia Rae is Head of the Department of English at Queen's University.

Have we moved beyond postmodernism? Did postmodernism lose its oppositional value when it became a cultural dominant? While focusing on questions such as these, the articles in this collection consider the possibility that the death of a certain version of postmodernism marks a renewed attempt to re-negotiate and perhaps re-embrace many of the cultural, literary and theoretical assumptions that postmodernism seemly denied outright. Including contributions from some of the leading scholars in the field - N. Katherine Hayles, John D. Caputo, Paul Maltby, Jane Flax, among others - this collection ultimately comes together to perform a certain work of mourning. Through their explorations of this current epistemological shift in narrative and theoretical production, these articles work to "get over" postmodernism while simultaneously celebrating a certain postmodern inheritance, an inheritance that can offer us important avenues to understanding and affecting contemporary culture and society.

Focusing on a recurring theme in twentieth-century film and literature, the fantasy of surviving one’s own death, Fantasies of Self-Mourning describes the formal features of a posthuman, cyborgian imaginary at work in modernism.

This book examines the persistence of modernism into the twenty-first century, and argues for its continued relevance in relation to contemporary traumas.

Diogenes died by holding his breath. Plato allegedly died of a lice infestation. Diderot choked to death on an apricot. Nietzsche made a long, soft-brained and dribbling descent into oblivion after kissing a horse in Turin. From the self-mocking haikus of Zen masters on their deathbeds to the last words (gasps) of modern-day sages, The Book of Dead Philosophers chronicles the deaths of almost 200 philosophers-tales of weirdness, madness, suicide, murder, pathos and bad luck. In this elegant and amusing book, Simon Critchley argues that the question of what constitutes a 'good death' has been the central preoccupation of philosophy since ancient times. As he brilliantly demonstrates, looking at what the great thinkers have said about death inspires a life-affirming enquiry into the meaning and possibility of human happiness. In learning how to die, we learn how to live.

How can the short story help to redefine modernism, postmodernism and their interrelationship? What is the status of the short story in modern literary history? These are the central questions that the essays collected in this volume try to answer from different perspectives through readings of short fiction in English and accounts of the genre’s theorisations. The essays by a group of international scholars tackle theoretical issues that are central in approaches to both “movements” such as periodisation, autonomy, high vs. popular literature, totality vs. fragmentation, surface vs. depth, otherness, representation, and, above all, the subject and its vicissitudes. Because it blends theory-based arguments into the approaches to the short fiction of mainly canonical authors (Joyce, Woolf, Lewis, Ballard, Carter, Rushdie, or Wallace), Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Short Story in English is of interest not only to readers and scholars of the short story, but also to those coming from the fields of literary theory and literary history.