The Dominion of the Dead

Cloth $22.50 ISBN: 9780226317915 Published November 2003

Paper $17.50 ISBN: 9780226317939 Published May 2005

E-book $7.00 to $14.00 About E-books ISBN: 9780226317922 Published April 2010

How do the living maintain relations to the dead? Why do we bury people when they die? And what is at stake when we do? In The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison considers the supreme importance of these questions to Western civilization, exploring the many places where the dead cohabit the world of the living—the graves, images, literature, architecture, and monuments that house the dead in their afterlife among us.

This elegantly conceived work devotes particular attention to the practice of burial. Harrison contends that we bury our dead to humanize the lands where we build our present and imagine our future. As long as the dead are interred in graves and tombs, they never truly depart from this world, but remain, if only symbolically, among the living. Spanning a broad range of examples, from the graves of our first human ancestors to the empty tomb of the Gospels to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Harrison also considers the authority of predecessors in both modern and premodern societies. Through inspired readings of major writers and thinkers such as Vico, Virgil, Dante, Pater, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Rilke, he argues that the buried dead form an essential foundation where future generations can retrieve their past, while burial grounds provide an important bedrock where past generations can preserve their legacy for the unborn.

The Dominion of the Dead is a profound meditation on how the thought of death shapes the communion of the living. A work of enormous scope, intellect, and imagination, this book will speak to all who have suffered grief and loss.

American Academy of Religion: American Academy of Religion Awards for Excellence
Short Listed

Modern Language Association of America: MLA-James Russell Lowell Prize
Honorable Mention

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"Mr. Harrison . . . has a rare poetic intelligence that does not shrink from speculative immensity. . . . In a kind of literary seance, the voices of the dead--poets like Swinburne and Homer, writers like Conrad and Joyce, philosophers like Vico and Heidegger--shape the text. Along the way are a discussion of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, an interpretation of Christianity's vision of resurrection, and speculation about how grief is inscribed in language. . . . It is a measure of [Harrison's] gifts that despite the book's difficulties and constraints, by the end one begins to think differently about the living as well as the dead."

"If my library were on fire and I was only allowed to save a single book from each decade, the one from the 1990s would be Robert Pogue Harrison's Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. So I approached its sequel, The Dominion of the Dead, with high expectations. It does not disappoint. This is the best book ever written about the cultural meaning of burial, our need to remember the dead (hence our need for history), and the deeper than etymological link between the human and the humus."—Jonathan Bate, Times Literary Supplement

"Throughout this dense work, [Harrison] applies the keen eye of a literary scholar to other great thinkers as well: Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hegel, Rousseau, Freud, and remarkable poets and writers across the ages, including Joyce, Virgil, Wordsworth, Rimbaud, Milton, Homer, Dante, and Pound. Harrison's use of semiotic analysis and linguistics to examine the tests these writers and thinkers have left us provide insight into what is very complex intellectual territory. . . . Those who persevere will be rewarded with a penetrating look into the realm of the dead, to whom, he claims, we give a future so that they may give us a past: 'We help them live on so that they may help us go forward.'"

"Humans, note Harrison in this gorgeous little book, . . . are a species 'grounded' to a past populated by the dead and their bodies, and to a future that will be occupied by the yet unborn. The signature of our species is that we know it. . . . [The dead's] place in our emotional, spiritual, and actual landscapes is at the core of our humanity. And the notion of human mortality is central to the human constructs of literature, history, architecture, government and religion. Indeed, the Earth itself depends upon the covenant between the living and the dead, in agreement to witness and remember. . . . This is a book to be read and re-read, dipped into, savored, re-examined at regular intervals throughout one's personal history. . . . Like the layers of humus from which we humans spring, and to which we will return, these ancient titles, old dialogues, dead writers, rich and decomposing words, are the ones from which Harrison wrestles the living, breathing text he offers here."

"Dr. Johnson said that the only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it. One of the things we have to endure is the death of loved ones and this year I have read a demanding but deeply moving book which does just that: Robert Pogue Harrison's The Dominion of the Dead."

"Not a sentimental indulgence in nostalgia or fashionable morbidity, this is an insightful scholarly and philosophical treatise.... The Dominion of the Dead belongs in that seminal class of books that open more than they close; it is, in Mr. Harrison's phrase, 'a reader's book rather than a writer's.' It is a significant and learned treatise on something that should concern all of us, even in our contemporary world, which relentlessly cultivates mindlessness as it wallows in its troughs of vulgarity and decadence."

"The Dominion of the Dead is a daring and ambitious book . . . . The subject is one in which the reader participates, and it will not end as long as there is someone to ponder it."--W. S. Merwin, New York Review of Books

"Ranging over a variety of classical, biblical, and modern philosophical sources, Harrison attempts nothing less than to reacquaint Western culture with its own thinking on death and by doing so, to change its comportment toward mortality--and toward life . . . . The result is something like a guide to the care of self (and society) through an analysis of the care for the dead, written in a manner that is inimitable, provocative and intellectually compelling."

"The most astonishing and searching book I've read this year is The Dominion of the Dead. . . . As well as being a profound study of humanity's burial practices, Harrison reminds us that culture is the condensed residue of the dead, and that our attitude to the dead defines our humanity."--Richard Holloway (Chairman of the Scottish Arts Council and former Bishop of Edinburgh), Glasgow Herald

"More a meditation than an argument, this is a subtle and enchanting book, one to be savored."

Contents

Preface
Note on References
1. The Earth and Its Dead
2. Hic Jacet
3. What Is a House?
4. The Voice of Grief
5. The Origin of Our Basic Words
6. Choosing Your Ancestor
7. Hic Non Est 000
8. The Names of the Dead
9. The Afterlife of the Image
Notes
Works Cited
Index

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Architecture: Architecture--Criticism

Culture Studies

History: European History

Literature and Literary Criticism: Romance Languages

Philosophy: General Philosophy

Religion: Religion and Literature

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