scholarly journals Speaking with the Dead: The Sick Chick and the Psychic Crypt in Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-58
Author(s):  
Catherine Macmillan
Keyword(s):  
Childhood Abuse ◽  
Single Woman ◽  
Loved One ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Chick Lit

Abstract This paper explores Gail Honeyman’s 2017 novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine from the perspective of Abraham and Torok’s concept of the psychic crypt. On one level the protagonist Eleanor, a thirty-year-old urban single woman searching for love, resembles a chick-lit heroine; however, Eleanor is deeply lonely, apparently autistic, suicidal and a survivor of childhood abuse and trauma. The paper argues that Eleanor’s difficulties can be understood as the consequences of encryptment which, in Abraham and Torok’s terms, is a disease of mourning where the dead loved one is incorporated rather than introjected into the psyche.

Braulio of Zaragoza’s Letters on Mourning

Augustinianum ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-197
Author(s):  
Alberto Ferreiro ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventh Century ◽  
Loved One ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Isidore Of Seville ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Church

Braulio of Zaragoza (c. 585/595-651) was one of the most prolific writers of seventh century Visigothic Spain. The collection of 44 letters that he wrote are a unique and rich depository of information for that era and region of western Christendom. He was a personal adviser to three Visigothic kings, Chinthila and Chindasvinth and Reccesvinth, and he correspondended with his renowned contemporary Isidore of Seville. This study focuses on the letters that he directed at people who had lost a loved one and who needed consolation in their moment of mourning. The letters do not reveal anything about funerary burial practices, but they do yield a rare personal glimpse of what the Church taught about mourning the dead. Personal letters by their very nature are a literary means where peopleexpress their intimate feelings, in this case both those who were the recipients and Braulio who wrote to them. We see the Bishop of Zaragoza at his pastoral best in the letters of consolation written to family and friends who were mourning.

Invest in Health, Not Death

Pained ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 139-140
Author(s):  
Michael D. Stein ◽  
Sandro Galea
Keyword(s):  
End Of Life ◽  
Advance Directives ◽  
End Of Life Care ◽  
Poor Health ◽  
Life Care ◽  
Loved One ◽  
The Dead

This chapter assesses the inevitability of death and the need to think about how people can live healthy lives, without ignoring how they end. Once people accept that they are going to die, how they spend their money and their time on health begins to shift. Perhaps death can help people focus on living better, on the conditions people need to create in order to generate health. Of course, people should not neglect the experience of dying. Two out of three Americans do not have advance directives that guide what treatments they receive if they are sick, and they cannot communicate the end-of-life care that they want. Engaging in a dialogue about how people manage the dying process can help correct this oversight. It is also important to remember those who are left. The dead leave behind the grieving, who can experience a burden of poor health that is directly linked to loss of their loved one. Ultimately, recognizing the inevitability of death can guide people toward ways in which they can live healthier, die with dignity, and ensure their loved ones are supported when they pass on.

Mourning, Remembrance, and Mahler's “Resurrection”

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-83
Author(s):  
Ryan R Kangas
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Gustav Mahler ◽  
Loved One ◽  
Resurrection Of The Dead ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Dead ◽  
To Come ◽  
Work Of Mourning ◽  
Coping With Death

Abstract “You must have had the experience of burying someone dear to you,” wrote Gustav Mahler in a letter explaining his Second Symphony to the music critic Max Marschalk, suggesting that the critic's own experiences with death might help him better understand the symphony. Inversely, if listeners bring personal losses to bear on the piece, Mahler's Second Symphony offers one possible model for coping with death. If we take the distinction that Sigmund Freud draws between two responses to loss—melancholia and mourning—as a discursive frame, Mahler's Second Symphony may be heard as an attempt to come to terms with the death of a loved one by moving gradually from melancholia to mourning. According to Freud, a melancholic subject cannot truly cope with the traumatic experience and instead reenacts it, but someone who mourns truly remembers the loss and thus commemorates the dead, allowing them to live on, if only in memory. Framed in such a way, the early movements of Mahler's Second Symphony—characterized by the alternation between halting sections that dissolve almost as soon as they begin and long-breathed melodies that seem to unfold effortlessly—suggest the melancholic subject's struggle between despair in the face of abject meaninglessness and a manic euphoria, neither of which addresses the loss. By contrast, the text in the symphony's final movement, adapted by Mahler from Friedrich Klopstock's chorale on the resurrection of the dead, encourages true remembrance of the deceased as a figure beyond death. Heard as a musical enactment of mourning, the final movement suggests that the dead who are mourned are resurrected through remembrance. Forcing us to acknowledge Mahler's death on some level, the final movement completes the work of mourning by engendering the composer's own resurrection in our memories as we witness each performance of his Second Symphony.

Flight from the Womb

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 713-737
Author(s):  
Charmaine Carvalho
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Single Women ◽  
Economic Liberalization ◽  
Single Woman ◽  
Mothers And Daughters ◽  
Feminine Subjectivity ◽  
Indian Context ◽  
Chick Lit ◽  
The City

Although chick lit, epitomized by novels such as Bridget Jones’s Diary, has been analyzed by feminist critics as an example of postfeminist culture, the transnational spread of the genre has resulted in transformations that invite fresh consideration. In the Indian context, chick lit emerged in the aftermath of economic liberalization, contributing to the configuration of a new feminine subjectivity—“the single woman in the city.” This article argues that the discourse of singleness in Indian chick lit is deployed not so much to solve the problem of singleness through marriage but to resolve the tension between the demands of “Indian tradition” on middle-class young women and their desire for a selfhood inflected by neoliberal discourses of autonomy. This dichotomy is symbolized in the novels in the tension between mothers and daughters and plays out primarily across the domains of choice of spouse, food, and dress. While tradition and modernity are conceptualized as binaries, the single women in these novels seem to be wrestling with a way of articulating a selfhood without having to pick a side. In their refusal to conform to ideas of Indian selfhood wherein individualism is circumscribed by autonomy, the “single woman” presents, if not ideally represents, the idea of synthesis.

Dead is not better: The multiple resurrections of Stephen King’s Revival

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Keyword(s):  
Mary Shelley ◽  
First Century ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Loved One ◽  
Death Of A Child ◽  
Weird Fiction ◽  
Mad Scientist ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Religious Revivals ◽  
Specific Sense

Stephen King’s 2014 novel, Revival, plays with its title in several respects. It is first a familiar Frankenstein-esque narrative about a mad scientist who seeks to revive the dead. It is also, however, about religious revivals, both in the specific sense of the religious gatherings held by minister and main antagonist Charles Jacobs, and in the more general sense of attempting to find something in which to place one’s faith in a world where accidents can claim the lives of loved ones. Beyond this, Revival plays with its title in two more senses. First, it elaborates on the recurring theme in King of existentialist angst precipitated by the death of a child or loved one, which King uses to question God’s benevolence or existence. In order to ask these questions, King also resurrects the spirit of Mary Shelley, taking from Frankenstein the theme of reanimation of the dead. The narrative’s conclusion, however, offers yet another revival as it transitions us from the horror of Shelley to the weird fiction of Arthur Machen and H. P. Lovecraft. Thus, through these various revivals, King’s novel charts the evolution of twentieth- and twenty-first-century horror from Shelley to Lovecraft and our contemporary ‘weird’ moment.

scholarly journals THE DEAD SPEAK: BIG DATA AND DIGITALLY MEDIATED DEATH

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Grandinetti ◽  
Tyler DeAtley ◽  
Jeffery Bruinsma
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Streaming Media ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Data Streaming ◽  
Loved One ◽  
User Data ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Individual

In the following panel, we add to scholarly challenges regarding the binary distinction between life and death by examining new strategies of making productive the data of the dead. Digital media and tactics of big data collection, storage, and processing blur the boundaries of human lifecycles, allowing the individual to exist as a productive part of sociotechnical apparatuses long after their corporeal demise. Specifically, our presentations on digital data and death focus on the topics of subjectivation, consent and privacy, and commodification. Reanimator: Haunted Data, Streaming Media, and Subjectivity examines the process of subjectivation taking into account the haunted data and digital afterlives of streaming media. Here, the living and bounded subject is challenged by compositions of big data, platforms, infrastructures, and algorithms that offer the possibility of a productive sociotechnical economic subject unbounded from the human body. Grief by the Byte: Constructions of Data Consent, Privacy, and Stability in Griefbots interrogates the data practices and ethics related to the creation of chatbots from the data of deceased individuals. While “griefbots” are framed as helpful to those grieving a lost loved one, there remain questions about consent and privacy that accompany these interactions. Finally, What is Dead May Never Die: The Commodification of Death in Social Media studies how user data maintains economic value after death via networks designed to surveil, collect, and commodify the immaterial labor of the dead. These practices enable a possible economic future largely influenced by the data of the dead.

scholarly journals Embalming, Viewing and the Social Construction of the Corpse: Time for Another Look

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 776-776
Author(s):  
Redmond Finney ◽  
Lisa Shulman ◽  
Raya Kheirbek
Keyword(s):  
Financial Burden ◽  
The United States ◽  
Occupational Hazards ◽  
Substantial Evidence ◽  
Loved One ◽  
Grieving Process ◽  
The Social ◽  
Expected Outcome ◽  
The Dead ◽  
True Condition

Abstract Embalming of the dead is more common in the United States than anywhere else in the world. Battles far from home during the Civil War with concern for contagion from dead bodies being shipped home, compelled President Lincoln to direct the troops to use embalming to allow the return of the Union dead to their homes. Viewings were common with war heroes and culminated with the viewing of Lincoln himself. In the 20th century embalming became a tradition despite substantial evidence indicating environmental and occupational hazards related to embalming fluids and carbon dioxide generated from manufacturing steel coffins before placing in concrete burial vaults. Embalming is promoted and considered helpful to the grieving process when families are comforted by a the appearance of a peaceful death. Embalmers are expected to produce an illusion of rest, an image that in some ways disguises death for the benefit of mourners. The dead are carefully displayed in a condition of liminal repose where the 'true' condition is hidden, and death is removed from the actual event. In this paper we highlight the spiritual and cultural complexities of embalming related- issues. We also provide data on the lack of grieving families’ preparedness for the financial burden associated with the death of a loved one and the lack of knowledge of alternative options. We propose an innovative process to empower people facing serious illness, and their families to make shared and informed decisions, especially when death is the expected outcome.

scholarly journals Is There, If Not Virtue, Any Moral Value to Be Found in Payback?

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 28
Author(s):  
Andrew Flescher
Keyword(s):  
Extreme Case ◽  
Moral Principle ◽  
Holocaust Survivor ◽  
Acting Out ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
Loved One ◽  
Primo Levi ◽  
Self Worth ◽  
The Dead

Can payback, punitive action fueled by the desire to hurt an offending aggressor, ever be justified? In Anger and Forgiveness, Martha Nussbaum emphatically answers “no”, arguing that payback and the anger on which it is based, even following severe loss, distracts one from pursuing the betterment and loving nature one should be striving to cultivate instead. Timothy Jackson admires Nussbaum’s appreciation for such a beautiful spiritual ideal but criticizes her for denying credit to the potential feeler of anger for overcoming the temptation to engage in payback, the initial presence of which is critical for a graceful and triumphant self-transformation. Diana Cates, qualifying Jackson, maintains that we should not assume in payback scenarios that it is suffering that is aimed at, even if the experienced pain of an offender is foreseeable. Granting the worthwhile high road Nussbaum and her respondents seek to travel, one may still ask: is there also a positive case to be made for desiring payback in the extreme case of responding to an egregious offense, i.e., an offense that is violent, paralyzing, and life-altering? Payback will not bring a lost loved one back from the dead, but can it bring oneself back from the dead? This essay explores the merits of this possibility, honing in on the therapeutic aspect of the desire—and occasionally the acting out of the desire—for a victim to pay her aggressor back in kind. Drawing on the work of the Christian realist Reinhold Niebuhr, the Judaic thinker and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, and the Christian ethicist and feminist Giles Milhaven, I argue that while no moral principle ever ought to be adopted out of retributive action—such action is by definition bereft of virtue—we should nevertheless not dismiss too quickly the notion of there being any moral value in desiring payback, for desiring payback might be an egregiously offended victim’s only alternative to the paralysis induced by malice. On this exceptional basis, payback strictly limited to its therapeutic scope may become, for the sake of preserving self-worth, not only tolerable, but a victim’s most preferable alternative.

scholarly journals ‘Phantom Letters’ in Various Cultures

2021 ◽  
pp. 111-121
Author(s):  
Natalia Yu. Orlova
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Loved One ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Epistolary Texts ◽  
The Russian Language

Cross-Сultural communication cannot exist without interaction, both oral and written. One of the types of written communication is epistolary text. This paper considers one kind of epistolary texts, the so-called ‘dead letter’, i.e. a letter which cannot be delivered to the recipient because this person does not exist. The author introduces the term ‘phantom letter’ since a corresponding term has not been found in the Russian language, besides the existing English term ‘dead letter’ does not fully reveal the phenomenon under discussion. The materials of the article are 14 personal letters and 24 literary texts in the English language belonging to the cultures of Ancient Egypt, the USA, Great Britain and Israel. The methodology of the research is based on the discourse analysis of the personal and fiction discourses. The following types of ‘phantom letters’ have been studied: letters to the dead, letters to the future generations and literary texts which are letters to some famous historical or fictional characters. Special attention is paid to various reasons why people have been writing such epistolary texts: the writer may do it on practical grounds, as a form of trauma counselling and/or resurrecting the loved one or information. As for the literary texts, the author’s aim is to create a humorous effect since all these letters are parodies. Chronotope is also considered, which is especially important in letters to the dead and letters to the future. Discourse formulas typical for some types of phantom letters have been analyzed. The last part of the paper deals with precedent texts, because understanding of fictional dead letters is drawn entirely from the knowledge of precedent. The conclusion states that there are various types of phantom letters in various cultures, they are normally personal and they are written for various reasons, however, they possess common features. Some prospects for further study in this area are also outlined.

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