Umfang:
1 Online-Ressource (x, 299 Seiten)
ISBN:
9780226641041
Inhalt:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: Literature and Death -- I. Soul -- II. Crypt -- III. Archive -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index
Inhalt:
People in the Middle Ages had chantry chapels, mortuary rolls, the daily observance of the Office of the Dead, and even purgatory-but they were still unable to talk about death. Their inability wasn't due to religion, but philosophy: saying someone is dead is nonsense, as the person no longer is. The one thing that can talk about something that is not, as D. Vance Smith shows in this innovative, provocative book, is literature. Covering the emergence of English literature from the Anglo-Saxon to the late medieval periods, Arts of Dying argues that the problem of how to designate death produced a long tradition of literature about dying, which continues in the work of Heidegger, Blanchot, and Gillian Rose. Philosophy's attempt to designate death's impossibility is part of a literature that imagines a relationship with death, a literature that intensively and self-reflexively supposes that its very terms might solve the problem of the termination of life. A lyrical and elegiac exploration that combines medieval work on the philosophy of language with contemporary theorizing on death and dying, Arts of Dying is an important contribution to medieval studies, literary criticism, phenomenology, and continental philosophy
Inhalt:
"Despite all of their extravagant mortuary forms-chantry chapels, mortuary rolls, the daily observance of the Office of the Dead, Purgatory itself-people in medieval England were unable to talk about death. That is, their inability was not exactly religious, but more philosophical: strictly speaking, saying Caesar "is" dead is nonsense, since he no longer "is." This example may seem like a purely academic problem, but it shook the confidence of systems of meaning, reference, and knowledge for more than a thousand years. In "Arts of Dying," D. Vance Smith argues that literature fills the impossible space between two convictions: the faith that language reaches the dead; and the logic that denies that language ever could. As Smith puts it, literature can talk "about" something that is not-strictly speaking-logically possible, and the literature of death, he argues, is neither a prayer nor a proposition, but rather the dream of a possible impossibility. Indeed, the literature of "death" is really the literature of "dying": there is no "debate" between Body and Soul after death; there are only the crucial decisions one can make now, the works we leave behind, before the long process of dying reaches its end. Surveying the philosophical problem of dying in literature in English, Smith identifies three crucial "moments" over the course of 600 years. In the first moment (900- 1300), he compares the principal Body and Soul poems from the period; in the second moment (the fourteenth century), he identifies the emergent metaphor of the crypt, the place or monument of death; and, finally, in the fifteenth century (in the years after Chaucer), he finds the dominant metaphor of dying to be the archive, where the literature of dying is a search for adequate terms and styles or forms that might survive death. The book contributes to medieval and literary studies, and, secondarily, to the adjacent areas of phenomenology and continental philosophy"--
Anmerkung:
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Weitere Ausg.:
ISBN 9780226640990
Weitere Ausg.:
ISBN 9780226640853
Weitere Ausg.:
Erscheint auch als Druck-Ausgabe Smith, D. Vance, 1963 - Arts of dying Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2020 ISBN 9780226640990
Weitere Ausg.:
ISBN 9780226640853
Sprache:
Englisch
Fachgebiete:
Anglistik
Schlagwort(e):
Mittelenglisch
;
Literatur
;
Tod
;
Mittelenglisch
;
Ars moriendi
;
Literatur
;
Geschichte 900-1500
DOI:
10.7208/9780226641041
URL:
https://chicago.degruyterbrill.com/view/title/569397
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