Narrative Mortality
Narrative Mortality

Author: Catherine Russell

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780816624867

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What seems like closure might be something more, as Catherine Russell shows us in this book about death in narrative cinema since the 1950s. Analyzing the structural importance of death in narrative endings, as well as the thematics of loss and redemption, Russell identifies mortality as a valuable critical tool for understanding the cinema of the second half of the twentieth century. Her work includes close textual readings of films by Fritz Lang, Wim Wenders, Oshima Nagisa, Jean-Luc Godard, and Robert Altman, among others. In these analyses, Russell reveals an uneasy relationship between death and closure, which she traces to anxieties about identity, gender, and national-cultural myths, and also to the persistence of desire. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, she shows us death as a fundamentally allegorical structure in cinema - and as a potential sign of historical difference, with crucial implications for theories of film narrative and spectatorship. "Narrative Mortality" provides an insight into the dynamics of postmodern cinema as it emerged from the modernist preoccupation with existential mortality. By tracing the role of death from a work that precedes the Brechtian cinema of the 60s ("Beyond a reasonable doubt") to several that succeed it ("Nashville", "The State of things"), the book expands the narrative project of new wave cinema and ushers it onto a broad historical plane.

Reading Death in Ancient Rome
Reading Death in Ancient Rome

Author: Mario Erasmo

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13:

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In Reading Death in Ancient Rome, Mario Erasmo considers both actual funerary rituals and their literary depictions in epic, elegy, epitaphs, drama, and prose works as a form of participatory theater in which the performers and the depicters of rituals engage in strategies to involve the viewer/reader in the ritual process, specifically by invoking and playing on their cultural associations at a number of levels simultaneously. He focuses on the associative reading process--the extent to which literary texts allude to funeral and burial ritual, the narrative role played by the allusion to recreate a fictive version of the ritual, and how the allusion engages readers' knowledge of the ritual or previous literary intertexts. Such a strategy can advance a range of authorial agendas by inviting readers to read and reread assumptions about both the surrounding Roman culture and earlier literature invoked through intertextual referencing. By (re)defining their relation to the dead, readers assume various roles in an ongoing communion with the departed. Reading Death in Ancient Rome makes an important and innovative contribution to semiotic theory as applied to classical texts and to the emerging field of mortality studies. It should thus appeal to classicists as well as to advanced undergraduate and graduate students in art history and archeology.

Birth, Death, and Femininity
Birth, Death, and Femininity

Author: Sara Heinämaa

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2010-10-25

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0253222370

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Issues surrounding birth and death have been fundamental for Western philosophy as well as for individual existence. The contributors to this volume unravel the gendered aspects of the classical philosophical discourses on death, bringing in discussions about birth, creativity, and the entire chain of human activity. By linking their work to major thinkers such as Heidegger, Nietzsche, Beauvoir, and Arendt, and to major philosophical currents such as ancient philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, and social and political philosophy, they challenge prevailing feminist articulations of birth and death. These philosophical reflections add an important sexual dimension to current thinking on identity, temporality, and community.

Mortality's Muse
Mortality's Muse

Author: D. T. Siebert

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2013-10-10

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 1611494559

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The inevitability of death—that of others and our own—is surely among our greatest anxieties. Mortality’s Muse: The Fine Art of Dying explores how art, mainly literary art, addresses that troubling reality. While religion and philosophy offer important consolations for life’s end, art responds in ways that are perhaps more complete and certainly more deeply human. Among subjects treated: the ars moriendi or “art of dying” tradition; the contrast between past and more recent cultural values; the religious consolation’s value but shortcoming for some people; the role of art in offering a secular consolation; dying as a performing art; the philosophic ideal of good death; the lively appeal of carpe diem or living for the present moment; the elegiac sense of life; and the two opposite parts Mortality’s Muse has played in dealing with war, the most senseless and unnecessary cause of death. The idea of an aesthetic sense of life forms the basis of these discussions. Human beings are makers in the largest sense of the word, and art represents everything they make—civilization itself with all its greatness and failings. Our civilization may ultimately be nothing but an evanescent blip in the cosmos. Even so, the creation of beauty, meaning, and purpose from disorder and suffering defines us as human beings. In the words of Robinson Jeffers, even if monuments eventually crumble and all art perish, yet for thousands of years carved stones have stood and “pained thoughts found the honey of peace in old poems.”

Mortality in Traditional Chinese Thought
Mortality in Traditional Chinese Thought

Author: Amy Olberding

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-01-02

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1438435649

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Mortality in Traditional China is the definitive exploration of a complex and fascinating but little-understood subject. Arguably, death as a concept has not been nearly as central a preoccupation in Chinese culture as it has been in the West. However, even in a society that seems to understand death as a part of life, responses to mortality are revealing and indicate much about what is valued and what is feared. This edited volume fills the lacuna on this subject, presenting an array of philosophical, artistic, historical, and religious perspectives on death during a variety of historical periods. Contributors look at material culture, including findings now available from the Mawangdui tomb excavations; consider death in Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist traditions; and discuss death and the history and philosophy of war.

The Ethics of Death
The Ethics of Death

Author: Lloyd Steffen

Publisher: Fortress Press

Published: 2014-07-01

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 1451487576

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In The Ethics of Death, the authors, one a philosopher and one a religious studies scholar, undertake an examination of the deaths that we experience as members of a larger moral community. Their respectful and engaging dialogue highlights the complex and challenging issues that surround many deaths in our modern world and helps readers frame thoughtful responses. Unafraid of difficult topics, Steffen and Cooley fully engage suicide, physician assisted suicide, euthanasia, capital punishment, abortion, and war as areas of life where death poses moral challenges.

Human in Death
Human in Death

Author: Associate Professor of Religion Kecia Ali

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 9781481306522

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Kecia Ali's Human in Death explores the best-selling futuristic suspense series In Death, written by romance legend Nora Roberts under the pseudonym J. D. Robb. Centering on troubled NYPSD Lieutenant Eve Dallas and her billionaire tycoon husband Roarke, the novels explore vital questions about human flourishing. Through close readings of more than fifty novels and novellas published over two decades, Ali analyzes the ethical world of Robb's New York circa 2060. Robb compellingly depicts egalitarian relationships, satisfying work, friendships built on trust, and an array of models of femininity and family. At the same time, the series' imagined future replicates some of the least admirable aspects of contemporary society. Sexual violence, police brutality, structural poverty and racism, and government surveillance persist in Robb's fictional universe, raising urgent moral challenges. So do ordinary ethical quandaries around trust, intimacy, and interdependence in marriage, family, and friendship. Ali celebrates the series' ethical successes, while questioning its critical moral omissions. She probes the limits of Robb's imagined world and tests its possibilities for fostering identity, meaning, and mattering of human relationships across social difference. Ali capitalizes on Robb's futuristic fiction to reveal how careful and critical reading is an ethical act.

Mortality, with Friends
Mortality, with Friends

Author: Fleda Brown

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2021-09-07

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0814348750

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A collection of intensely personal lyrical essays about mortality, living well, art, and love. Mortality, With Friends is a collection of lyrical essays from Fleda Brown, a writer and caretaker, of her father and sometimes her husband, who lives with the nagging uneasiness that her cancer could return. Memoir in feel, the book muses on the nature of art, of sculpture, of the loss of bees and trees, the end of marriages, and among other things, the loss of hearing and of life itself. Containing twenty-two essays, Mortality, With Friends follows the cascade of loss with the author's imminent joy in opening a path to track her own growing awareness and wisdom. In "Donna," Brown examines a childhood friendship and questions the roles we need to play in each other's lives to shape who we might become. In "Native Bees," Brown expertly weaves together the threads of a difficult family tradition intended to incite happiness with the harsh reality of current events. In "Fingernails, Toenails," she marvels at the attention and suffering that accompanies caring for our aging bodies. In "Mortality, with Friends," Brown dives into the practical and stupefying response to her own cancer and survival. In "2019: Becoming Mrs. Ramsay," she remembers the ghosts of her family and the strident image of herself, positioned in front of her Northern Michigan cottage. Comparable to Lia Purpura's essays in their density and poetics, Brown's intent is to look closely, to stay with the moment and the image. Readers with a fondness for memoir and appreciation for art will be dazzled by the beauty of this collection.

Life and Mortality in Ugaritic
Life and Mortality in Ugaritic

Author: Matthew McAffee

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2019-12-11

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 1646020383

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While topics such as death, funerary cult, and the netherworld have received considerable scholarly attention in the context of the Ugaritic textual corpus, the related concept of life has been relatively neglected. Life and Mortality in Ugaritic takes as its premise that one cannot grasp the significance of mwt (“to die”) without first having wrestled with the concept of ḥyy (“to live”). In this book, Matthew McAffee takes a lexical approach to the study of life and death in the Ugaritic textual corpus. He identifies and analyzes the Ugaritic terms most commonly used to talk about life and mortality in order to construct a more representative framework of the ancient perspective on these topics, and he concludes by synthesizing the results of this lexical study into a broader literary discussion that considers, among other things, the implications for our understanding of the first-millennium Katumuwa stele from Zincirli. McAffee’s study complements previous scholarly work in this area, which has tended to rely on conceptual and theoretical treatment of mortality, and advances the discussion by providing a more focused lexical analysis of the Ugaritic terms in question. It will be of interest to Semitic scholars and those who study Ugaritic in particular, in addition to students of the culture of the ancient Levant.

Living in Death’s Shadow
Living in Death’s Shadow

Author: Emily K. Abel

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2017-02-28

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 1421421844

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Challenging assumptions about caregiving for those dying of chronic illness. What is it like to live with—and love—someone whose death, while delayed, is nevertheless foretold? In Living in Death’s Shadow, Emily K. Abel, an expert on the history of death and dying, examines memoirs written between 1965 and 2014 by family members of people who died from chronic disease. In earlier eras, death generally occurred quickly from acute illnesses, but as chronic disease became the major cause of mortality, many people continued to live with terminal diagnoses for months and even years. Illuminating the excruciatingly painful experience of coping with a family member’s extended fatal illness, Abel analyzes the political, personal, cultural, and medical dimensions of these struggles. The book focuses on three significant developments that transformed the experiences of those dying and their intimates: the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, the growing use of high-tech treatments at the end of life, and the rise of a movement to humanize the care of dying people. It questions the exalted value placed on acceptance of mortality as well as the notion that it is always better to die at home than in an institution. Ultimately, Living in Death’s Shadow emphasizes the need to shift attention from the drama of death to the entire course of a serious chronic disease. The chapters follow a common narrative of life-threatening disease: learning the diagnosis; deciding whether to enroll in a clinical trial; acknowledging or struggling against the limits of medicine; receiving care at home and in a hospital or nursing home; and obtaining palliative and hospice care. Living in Death’s Shadow is essential reading for everyone seeking to understand what it means to live with someone suffering from a chronic, fatal condition, including cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, and heart disease.