Thanatography: Literature and Death - ABO700588

• Title: Thanatography: Literature and Death
• Guaranteed by: Department of Czech and Comparative Literature (21-UCLK)
• Faculty: Faculty of Arts
• Actual: from 2023
• Semester: winter
• Points: 5
• E-Credits: 5
• Examination process: winter s.:
• Hours per week, examination: winter s.:0/2, Ex [HT]
• Capacity: unknown / unknown (unknown)
• Min. number of students: unlimited
• 4EU+: no
• Virtual mobility / capacity: no
• State of the course: not taught
• Language: English
• Teaching methods: full-time
• Note: course can be enrolled in outside the study plan; enabled for web enrollment
• Guarantor: Mgr. Jan Musil
• Class: A – Mezioborová nabídka VP: Literatura; Exchange - 09.2 General and Comparative Literature

Annotation

We have pushed death out of sight, stripping it of its importance for the life of an individual with each medicinal
innovation and image of youth and health. However, it has returned in the form of the covid-19 pandemic and a
conflict that has been unimaginable for many not too long ago. This seminar focuses on different representations
of death in European literature from antiquity to the present, paying attention to the changes in terms of narrative
strategies, metaphors and cultural significance of death and related concepts, such as resurrection, immortality,
or illness. The main goal, then, is to track the dominant figures and representations of death, in order to find the
sources of thanatopoetics used by literary texts today.

Last update: Kafka Ivan, Mgr. Bc. (19.07.2022)

Course completion requirements

In-class participation: maximum of 3 missed classes, active participation in the discussion

Presentation: a short contextualization of a given text

Essay: an essay of about 1 500 words on a relevant topic (to be discussed in advance)

Last update: Kafka Ivan, Mgr. Bc. (19.07.2022)

Literature

Reading
Alighieri, Dante. Inferno. Translated by Robin Kirkpatrick, Penguin Classics, 2013.

Augustine. The Passion of Ss. Perpetua and Felicity. Translated by Walter Shewring, Sheed and Ward, 1931.

Barnes, Julian. Levels of Life. Vintage Books, 2014.

Bennett, Alice. „Literature and the Afterlife.“ The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature. Edited By W. Michelle Wang, Daniel K. Jernigan, Neil Murphy, Routledge, 2020, pp. 53-61.

The Bible. (translation TBD)

Boyer, Anne. The Undying. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

Callus, Ivan. „Autothanatography and Contemporary Poetry.“ The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature. Edited By W. Michelle Wang, Daniel K. Jernigan, Neil Murphy, Routledge, 2020, pp. 361-370.

Delbo, Charlotte. Days and Memory. Translated by Rosette Lamont, The Marlboro Press, 1990.

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by E. V. Rieu, Penguin Classics, 2009.

The Epic of Gilgamesh. Translated by Maureen Gallery Kovács. Stanford University Press, 1989.

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by A. D. Melville, Oxford University Press, 1998.

Tepl, Johanness von. Der Ackermann aus Bӧhmen. Edited by Keith Spalding. Oxford, 1950.

Sebald, W. G. Campo Santo. Translated by Anthea Bell, Penguin, 2006.

Selected Bibliography
Ariès, Phillipe. The Hour of Our Death. Translated by Helen Weaver, Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.

Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. Free Press, 1997.

Blanco, Maria-José, Ricarba Vidal, editors. The Power of Death: Contemporary Reflections of Death in Western Society. Berghahn, 2017.

Földényi, László F. Melancholy. Translated by Tim Wilkinson, Yale University Press, 2016.

Gilmore, Cody. „When Do Things Die?“ The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death. Edited by Ben Bradley, Fred Feldman, and Jens Johansson, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 5-59.

Gertsman, Elina. The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance. Brepols, 2010.

Horn, Eva. Trauer schreiben. Die Toten im Text der Goethezeit. Fink, 1998.

Jernigan, D.K., & Murphy, N., editors. The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature. Routledge, 2020.

Kamlah, Wilhelm. Meditatio Mortis. Kann man den Tod verstehen und gibt es ein Recht auf den eigenen Tod? Verlag Klett-Cotta, 1976.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press, 1982.

Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. On death and dying. Routledge, 1973.

Lachmann, Renate. "Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature". Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2008, pp. 301-310.

Freud, Sigmund. „Mourning and melancholia.“ The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by J. Strachey. Bind XIV. Vintage, 2001, pp. 237-59.

Thurston, Michael. The Underworld in Twentieth-Century Poetry: From Pound and Eliot to Heaney and Walcott. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

S. W. Goodwin, E. Bronfen, editors. Death and Representation. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Last update: Kafka Ivan, Mgr. Bc. (19.07.2022)

Syllabus

In-class participation: maximum of 3 missed classes, active participation in the discussion

Presentation: a short contextualization of a given text

Essay: an essay of about 1 500 words on a relevant topic (to be discussed in advance)

Last update: Kafka Ivan, Mgr. Bc. (19.07.2022)