EL5093: UNBURIED MEMORIES: DEATH, TRAUMA AND MOURNING IN LITERATURE (2014-2015)

A loved one may be interred within an earthen grave, but they live on in the memories of those that survive their passing. This course explores the personal and social constructions of that ‘passing’, and examines the ways in which writers have figured grief and loss in literature as they strive for a language that would bear and sustain the lost ‘other’. Drawing on psychoanalytic theories of mourning and melancholia, analysing the functions and effects of mortuary/funerary practices, and engaging with the history of scientific and medical approaches to trauma, the course engages with different cultural conceptions of memory and how they are encoded in literary texts. Some sessions may look in depth at nineteenth-century conceptions of memory and mourning or at Early Modern conceptions of death and mourning. Students will focus on a variety of themes and arguments, including: the relations between death and art; debates concerning mourning and its admissibility in different cultural contexts; elegiac practice, particularly the psychological propensity of poetic elegy to translate grief into consolation; cultural memory and death, namely how death can be viewed as foundational for community; the relationship between mourning and writing and on how the death of a person can serve as a catalyst for self-reflection, and how writing can function as a form of grief-work; the traumatic nature of grief and how such trauma can be detected in literary works.

Information on contact teaching time is available from the course guide.

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2x1000-word response papers (10% each), 1x 4,500-word essay (70%), presentation (10%).

There are no assessments for this course.

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