“Thanatographies and the Modes of Literary Mourning”

Contact : me@janmusil.net 

Research Area 2 

In my research at the Department of Czech and Comparative Literature, Charles University, I am looking at autobiographical narratives concerned with the death of a close person and mourning, which I call thanatographies. 

In the contexts of claims that death had been made into a taboo during the 20th century (Ariès, Becker, Ohler, Jankélévitch, etc.), I understand thanatographies, emerging mainly in the second half of the period, as counter-narratives that treat death in its different forms, such as death of the other, grief, fear of own death, processes of dying, hospitalization, suicide, etc. in a sensitive and complex manner. If the norm is death that is on the one hand inexpressible or radically Other, or, on the other hand, aesthesized, objectified and medicalized, then the transgression is death, dying and grief as a subjective experience, communicated through writing, which is aware of its own performative nature (de Man) and seeks a sense of agency in the grieving process (Blumenberg). I am mainly interested in how mourning is staged using literary means, and I offer alternatives to the widespread Freudian reading of grief writing (not just thanatographies, but elegies and other commemorative genres, too) as work of mourning.  Continue reading Jan Musil – Research & CV →