Osmý seminář CEFRESu
Mezioborový seminář si klade za cíl otevírat diskusi o vědeckých metodách, přístupech a konceptech. Účastníkům umožňuje vzájemně porovnávat své vědecké přístupy a seznamovat se s aktuálními tématy výzkumu napříč obory humanitních věd.

Místo konání: knihovna CEFRESu a online (odkaz k přípojení a text ke čtení, prosím, požadujte na adrese cefres@cefres.cz)
Datum: úterý, 15. dubna 2025, 16:30
Jazyk: angličtina

Jan MUSIL (Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy / doktorand přidružený k CEFRESu)

Diskutující: Hélène MARTINELLI (École normale supérieure de Lyon)

Abstrakt

With the christian idea of afterlife gradually fading away, 20th century rediscovered death as a real possibility and ultimate termination of individual life, only to make it into an insufferable, abjected topic and a taboo that is, as Geoffrey Gorer provocatively suggests in 1955, only accessible to the Western culture in hypertrophied genres of literature and film that he calls collectively the pornography of death.

With the christian idea of afterlife gradually fading away, 20th century rediscovered death as a real possibility and ultimate termination of individual life, only to make it into an insufferable, abjected topic and a taboo that is, as Geoffrey Gorer provocatively suggests in 1955, only accessible to the Western culture in hypertrophied genres of literature and film that he calls collectively the pornography of death. Contrary to this narrative, a body of life/death prose begins to emerge in the second half of the century that does not exploit the topics of illness, dying, death, and specifically grief at the death of a loved one, but rather takes them as a point of departure to understand mortality without resorting to unfounded hope of reunion or exaggeration through genre plots. Thanatographies, being of autobiographical/autofictional character, can be understood, with Paul Ricoeur, as reconfigurations of different tropes related to death and resignifications of the intensified experience of mortality, presenting at the same time a posture (Jérôme Meizoz) of the writer that is concerned with rendering the assumed extraliteral experience in an authentic way (William Watkin). Reframing Freud’s widely used term “work of grief” as “play of grief”, I seek to free the reading of thanatographies of psychological/psychoanalytical assumptions and focus rather on the literary means of performing grief. Selected works by writers such as Peter Handke, Péter Esterházy then show how “modern” loss and death is often approached indirectly and subsequent grief is staged, in accord with the romantic traditions, as authentic using various tropes of inexpressibility, such as metafiction, intertextuality and fragmentation. Finally, drawing on the posthumously published manuscript by Jan Patočka titled “The Phenomenology of Afterlife”, which conspicuously emphasises the role of literature, I suggest we understand thanatographies as one of the ways of reinterpretation and actualization of our relationship to the deceased.

Kompletní program semináře pro 2024-2025 naleznete zde.