Spectacular Death
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)Representability
Distributed for Intellect Ltd
Spectacular Death
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)Representability
A collection of essays on the medical and social articulation of death, this anthologyconsiders to what extent a subject as elusive as death can be examined. Though it touches us all, we can perceive it only in life—with the predictable result that we treat it either as a clinical or social problem to be managed or as a phenomenon to be studied quantitatively.
This volume goes beyond these models to self-reflexively question how the management of death is organized and motivated and the ways that death is at once feared and embraced. Drawing on the very latest in the medical humanities, Spectacular Death gives us an enlightening new perspective on death from the classical world to the twenty-first century.
302 pages | 10 halftones | 7 x 9 | © 2011
Culture, Disease, and Well-Being
Philosophy: General Philosophy
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Tristanne Connolly
Classical Death: Comedy and Tragedy
1. Life, Death, and the In-Between: The Duck-Rabbit/The Face of the Clown
Alan Blum
2. The Illness of Hope, the Cure of Truth and the Difference of Principle: A Reflexive Analysis of Antigone’s and Meursault’s Confrontations with Death
Kieran Bonner
Enlightenment and Romanticism: Aestheticizing the Corpse
3. Reflexive Vectors: Art, Anatomy and Death in Cowper and Gamelin
Morgan Tunzelmann
4. “Mother of Unworthy Woe”: Infant Death and Sentimental Maternity in British Romantic Women’s Poetry and Midwifery Books
Tristanne Connolly
5. Speaking of Death: Remembrance and Lamentation
Jan Plecash
Memorialization and the City
6. Enjoyment’s Petrification: The Luxor Obelisk in a Melancholic Century
Michael Follert
7. Barcelona, In Memoriam: The Tension Between Urban Renovation and the Past
Marta Marín-Dòmine
8. Jewish Victims and German Youth: Questions of Pedagogy and Responsibility at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp
Elke Grenzer
9. X Marks the Spot: New Orleans Under Erasure
Kevin Dowler
10. Life and Death in New Orleans: Disaster Tours Imagined
Stephen Svenson and Cory Ruf
Policy: Border Control Between Life and Death
11. Hope and Resignation in Medical Care: When Doctors Go to Court to Terminate Patient Treatment
Diego Llovet
12. Life-threatening (Anaphylactic) Food Allergies: School Life, Health and Well-being
Saeed Hydaralli
Live Deaths and Afterlives
13. Game Death: Fantasy and Mastery in Scenario Paintball
Ariane Hanemaayer
14. Delirious Exhibitionism: Negotiating Technologies in Timothy Leary’s Live Death
Elizabeth C. Effinger
15. How the Dead Circulate (in Life)
Peter McHugh
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors