A death of one's own : literature, law, and the right to die / Jared Stark.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stark, Jared Louis, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Suicide in literature.

Euthanasia in literature.

Right to die--Law and legislation.

Right to die.

Right to die--Moral and ethical aspects.

Law and literature.

Physical Description:

x, 180 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018.

Summary:

To be or not to be-who asks this question today, and how? What does it mean to issue, or respond to, an appeal for the right to die? In A Death of One's Own, the first sustained literary study of the right to die, Jared Stark takes up these timely questions by testing predominant legal understandings of assisted suicide and euthanasia against literary reflections on modern death from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by writers including Balzac, Melville, Benjamin, and Améry. Rigorously interdisciplinary and lucidly argued, Stark's wide-ranging discussion sheds critical light on the disquieting bioethical and biopolitical dilemmas raised by contemporary forms of medical technology and legal agency. A thought-provoking work that will be of interest to those concerned with law and humanities, biomedical ethics, cultural history, and human rights, A Death of One's Own opens new and suggestive paths for thinking about the history of modern death as well as the unsettled future of the right to die. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction

Preferring not to: living wills, assisted suicide, Bartleby

The modernist art of death: Balzac, Baudelaire, Benjamin

Death with dignity after Auschwitz

Epilogue. Dead letters.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780810136779

0810136775

9780810136762

0810136767

OCLC:

1003193310