Waubonsee Community College

Death's door, modern dying and the ways we grieve, Sandra M. Gilbert

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 525-553) and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Death's door

bibliography

57316831

Sandra M. Gilbert

modern dying and the ways we grieve

Critic, poet, and memoirist Sandra M. Gilbert explores our relationship to death through literature, history, poetry and societal practices. Seneca wrote, "Anyone can stop a man's life but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it." This inevitability has left varying marks on all human cultures. Exploring expressions of faith, burial customs, photographs, poems, and memoirs, Sandra M. Gilbert examines both the changelessness of grief and the changing customs that mark contemporary mourning

Arranging my mourning: five meditations on the psychology of grief. -- Death opens -- All Souls' Day -- A door opens -- On the threshold -- Voices -- Widow -- Phone call -- Keening/kissing -- Plath's etymology -- Sati -- The widower's Exequy -- The widow's lament -- The widow's desire -- Mr. Lowell and the spider -- Yahrzeit -- Why is this day different from other days? -- Caring for the dead -- Gravestones -- The buried life -- The buried self -- E-mail to the dead -- The hypothetical life -- Purgatories -- Textual resurrections -- Psychic research -- Letters to the virtual world -- Allas the Deeth -- Writing wrong -- Keynote -- Weep and write -- THIS is the curse. Write -- You must be wicked to deserve such pain -- A hole in the heart -- Impossible to tellHistory makes death: how the twentieth century reshaped dying and mourning. -- Expiration/termination -- "Modern death" -- "Expiration" vs. "termination" -- Ash Wednesday -- Timor mortis -- Ghosts of heaven -- Nada -- The souls of animals -- Technologies of death -- Extermination -- Conditio inhumana -- Annihilation in history -- The great war and the city of death -- Hell on earth -- The German requiem -- 8. Technologies of dying -- In the hospital spaceship -- Questions of technology -- The inhospitable hospital -- The doctor's detachment -- What Vivian is bearing -- 9. A day in the death of ... -- Chronology number 1: recording death -- Chronology number 2: death watching -- Chronology number 3: home movies -- Chronology number 4: flashbulb memories -- The celluloid afterlife -- Death and the camera -- Seeing and believing -- Mortality on display -- Haunting photographs -- Millennial mourning -- A prayer flag -- Mourning becomes electronic -- The embarrassment of the comforter -- The shame of the mourner -- Mourning as malarkey -- Ritual offerings -- Monumental particularitiesThe handbook of heartbreak: contemporary elegy and lamentation. -- On the beach with Sylvia Plath -- Berck-Plage -- "Berck-Plage" -- This is the sea, then, this great abeyance -- Nobodaddy -- It is given up -- Sylvia Plath and "Sylvia Plath" -- Was the nineteenth century different, and luckier? -- The death book stuff -- "Not poetry" -- Whitman, and Mother Death and Father Earth -- Dickinson, and death and the maiden -- Grave, tomb, and battle corpses -- "Rats' alley" and the death of pastoral -- The army of the dead -- What was "pastoral"? -- The poetry is in the pity -- Down some profound dull tunnel -- I think we are in rats' alley/where the dead men lost their bones -- The man who does not know this has not understood anything -- Monsters of elegy -- Ryoan-ji -- Let the lamp affix its beam -- How to perform a funeral -- Documenting death -- Death studies -- Listening, looking -- Remembering -- Imagining -- Is there no consolation? -- Apocalypse now (and then) -- Y2K -- The unspeakable emergency -- Apo-kalypso -- Ground Zero -- Closure?