The ethics of mourning : grief and responsibility in elegiac literature / R. Clifton Spargo.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Spargo, R. Clifton.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--History and criticism.

English literature.

Mourning customs in literature.

Judaism and literature--English-speaking countries.

Judaism and literature.

Elegiac poetry, American--History and criticism.

Elegiac poetry, American.

Elegiac poetry, English--History and criticism.

Elegiac poetry, English.

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature.

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) in literature.

Loss (Psychology) in literature.

Ethics in literature.

Grief in literature.

Death in literature.

English-speaking countries.

Physical Description:

x, 314 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Contents:

Ethics versus Morality 6

From Literature to Ethics, and Back Again 9

1 Toward an Ethics of Mourning 14

When Mourning Is Ethical 18

The Ethical Imagination and the Defense of the Other 27

Revising Impossibility 32

2 Mourning and Substitution in Hamlet 39

The Emergence of a Norm 41

Contra Freud 47

The Argument against Substitution 52

"Good Hamlet" and the Absent Father 58

"Look you now what follows" 67

3 Lyrical Economy and the Question of Alterity 81

Demodocos's Song: The Economic Plot of Lyric 87

The Statements of Economy in Renaissance Elegy 92

"Adventure most unto itself": Dickinson, the Home, and Identity 101

Come Again, Odysseus 109

The Dissatisfactions of Economy 120

4 The Ethical Rhetoric of Anti-Elegy 128

How Modern Is Your Grief? 131

Belated Mourners 135

The Paradox of Intimacy 142

Toward Reciprocity: Shelley's "Adonais" 146

The Defensiveness of Elegy 159

5 Wishful Reciprocity in Thomas Hardy's Poems of 1912-13 165

Reciprocity, Redux 168

Addressing the Other Who Beckons 172

The "Dulled" Example of Responsiveness 177

Doing without Ceremony 188

The Orphean Specter of Hardy's Mourning 192

A Remembrance beyond Reproach 202

6 The Bad Conscience of American Holocaust Elegy: The Example of Randall Jarrell 209

The Rhetoric of Grief 213

Mourning as the Occasion of History: "A Camp in the Prussian Forest" 218

Mock-pastoral Sensibility and the Holocaust Elegy 225

The Cessation of the Personal Idiom 234

7 The Holocaust She Walks In: Sylvia Plath and the Demise of Lyrical Selfhood 241

Reviewing Ariel Once More 245

Sacrifice, History, and the Personal Idiom: "Mary's Song" 249

"Daddy" and the Moral Difficulty of Making Nazis Familiar 258

Grief's Impossible Redemptions 264.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [275]-308) and index.

ISBN:

0801879779

OCLC:

54079825