China Miéville: The Work of Mourning

<p>This thesis begins from an attempt to place recent changes in science fiction and fantasy criticism in context within contemporary debates and schisms within Left politics. It examines the ways in which China Miéville’s fiction reflects on and intervenes in these debates on questions of modernity, community, and collectivity. Through readings of The City & the City, The Last Days of New Paris, and This Census-Taker, I seek to examine the ways in which Miéville’s fiction, through an acknowledgement of the impossibility of escaping historically and culturally situated perspectives and through an awareness of the dangers of the appeal to community, arrives at the position of foregrounding contingency, heterogeneity, and ambiguity. Drawing particularly on Derrida’s image of the ghost in Spectres of Marx and its exploration and elaboration in the work of Simon Critchley, I argue that Miéville’s writing, especially in his most recentnovellas, is representative of, and participative in, politics as a work of mourning.</p>

China Miéville: The Work of Mourning

<p>This thesis begins from an attempt to place recent changes in science fiction and fantasy criticism in context within contemporary debates and schisms within Left politics. It examines the ways in which China Miéville’s fiction reflects on and intervenes in these debates on questions of modernity, community, and collectivity. Through readings of The City & the City, The Last Days of New Paris, and This Census-Taker, I seek to examine the ways in which Miéville’s fiction, through an acknowledgement of the impossibility of escaping historically and culturally situated perspectives and through an awareness of the dangers of the appeal to community, arrives at the position of foregrounding contingency, heterogeneity, and ambiguity. Drawing particularly on Derrida’s image of the ghost in Spectres of Marx and its exploration and elaboration in the work of Simon Critchley, I argue that Miéville’s writing, especially in his most recentnovellas, is representative of, and participative in, politics as a work of mourning.</p>

Language of Grief and Body in Translation

Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship was, in the words of scholar Marguerite Feitlowitz, "an intensely verbal takeover" (Feitlowitz 22). The language of the military junta was one that spun an illusion of reality out of abstractions and absolutes, while in fact, it cloaked real events to produce a culture of denial. I discuss my translation of María Negroni’s lyric novel about The Dirty War, The Annunciation, which enters the dysfunctional language of dictatorship as a site of poetic play. Negroni dramatizes how this language prohibits, above all else, grief. Specifically, it deploys a language of melancholy as a radical gesture in a linguistic-political context where the body, and the embodied, have disappeared. Drawing from passages in my translation I highlight translation as it participates in problems of loss, silence, and absence, and ultimately, as it performs the recuperative work of mourning.

The Socialist Cemetery

Chapter 2 charts the development of new mourning rites in East Germany, focusing on the role that music played in these ceremonies. Death rituals articulated a new death culture for the socialist state. This chapter examines three aspects of East German death culture: the reestablishment of ceremonies to honor communist heroes from the Weimar Republic, state burials for East German politicians, and manuals published for funeral planning intended for the general public. Visually and rhetorically, state ceremonies were political displays that marginalized the emotional needs of the mourning community. But the music in these services intoned the new country’s connections to customs that the ruling party were explicitly attempting to displace: the Nazis’ heroic burial customs and the mourning rituals of the Lutheran church. In early efforts to fashion a socialist sepulchral culture across multiple artforms, a gap emerged between political ideology and musical reality that allowed composers, performers, and audiences to enact the work of mourning through music.

Counseling Persons with Parkinson’s

This chapter continues the case study begun in Chapter 8, demonstrating how Phases Two and Three of the loss-based counseling approach look in practice. Together, the counselor and client should proceed with their work in light of the client having a deeper awareness and understanding of his needs and desires. Through further dialogue and by virtue of an ongoing convergence of their horizons of experience, they now collaborate further with the goal of formulating a plan for ameliorating the client’s various concerns. The chapter attends particularly to formulating a plan of action based on primary identified problems and their effects, with the focus here returning to the five purposeful actions, receiving, enduring, adjusting, relocating, and sojourning, and how these inform the work of mourning. The chapter concludes with practical tips for continuing to utilize what the client has learned after counseling ends.

“How do you grieve a number?” – Unsuccessful Grieving in Jess Walter’s The Zero

"“How do you grieve a number?” – Unsuccessful Grieving in Jess Walter’s The Zero. Accountability and grief, assuming different forms and accommodating a variety of (sometimes antithetical) approaches, seem to be the dominants shaping 9/11 fiction and, consequently, the attendant criticism. Grief is a central theme to Jess Walter’s The Zero, examined in various manifestations, ranging from public to private, from counterfeit to genuine. The claim of this paper is that The Zero explores alternatives of grief only to invite the thought that the work of mourning, in a traditionally ‘successful’ sense, is no longer possible post-9/11. Keywords: 9/11 fiction, exploration of grief, work of mourning, trauma narrative, Jess Walter "

“Our Eyes Adjust to the Dark”: The Cosmic Sublime in Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars

The cosmic sublime, as the most spectacular manifestation of the natural sublime, offers rich stimuli for the literary imagination, as well as for various interactions between science, culture and art. In her book of poetry Life on Mars (2011), Tracy K. Smith uses tropes of cosmic perspective, scientific gaze and interplanetary travel to problematize the relationship between human finitude and the boundless unknown of the universe. Written after the death of her father, who was one of the engineers of the Hubble telescope, the volume links personal elegy and the work of mourning with philosophical questions about the relationship between the self and scientifically framed visions of the cosmos. The primary intention of my study is to examine the strategies and implications of the poet’s revisionary engagement with the aesthetics, rhetoric, popular mythology and mysticism of the spatial infinite. Smith employs the cosmic sublime not only as a spatial mode of perception but also as a metaphor of the emotional response to death. Her adaptation of the category expands the frame of reference for the purposes of an existential inquiry into the nature of humanity and transcendence. The celebration of imaginative freedom and modern science’s command of nature is further linked to constant apprehension about the human abuse of power and to anxieties triggered by the sublime mythology of transcendence, informed by a desire for dominating the other to the point of possession.