Thanatographical fiction
Death, mourning and ritual in contemporary literature and film
The project is based on the observation that in recent years, many authors and filmmakers around the world have taken on the difficult task of commemorating the unmourned dead caused by wars, terrorism or structural violence, and of giving them a literary or filmic burial. It thus aims to investigate the expression of grief as a reaction to violent deaths in literature, film, and graphic novels.
Based on the idea that in the context of violent events there is a connection between grief and not only past but also future violence, the project seeks to analyse and understand how fiction intervenes in processes of individual and collective grieving, especially of deaths who are marginalized in public discourse (be it due to the respective individual’s race, class, and/
As narration plays an essential role in collective imaginaries, the project seeks to gain a new consciousness about the relationship between (structural) violence and grief from the analysis of a transcultural and comparative corpus of fiction. These fictions, which the project will call thanatographical fictions, play a central role for the collective imaginary in that they provide an archive of knowledge on how violent death and grief are processed.
While the connection between unmourned deaths and violence has already been established e.g. by J. Butler, fictional reactions to the casualties have, up to now, mostly been analysed in direct relation to concrete violent events (for example of terrorist attacks), resulting mostly in a national rather than a comparative perspective. The project sees these fictions as a text family whose analysis will permit the establishment of a poetics of grief capable of framing the emotions unleashed by mourning and modulating them with the means proper to fiction.
The study of a comparative corpus will show that there is a transcultural and transmedia poetics of grief that regulates and moderates processes of an economy of emotions: in order to address the subject of violent death, thanatographical fiction has to resort to different narrative and aesthetic strategies of emotion control. The project aims to demonstrate that within fictions from diverse linguistic and cultural areas these strategies serve to frame and channel emotions, to give them a form that allows access to them without sparking further excess. By modulating emotions, texts, films, or graphic novels influence both the regulation of grief and commemoration on one hand, and on the other, the reinforcement of collective identities. They can thus provide an instrument for reflecting on the interaction of grief and violence to gain a better understanding of it.
Artikel
Cornelia Ruhe: „Thanatographical Fiction. Death, Mourning and Ritual in Contemporary Literature and Film“. In: Memory Studies 17,6, 2024, 1519-1535.
Cornelia Ruhe: „Morts, sépultures et deuil. Les fictions thanatographiques de Mohamed Mbougar Sarr“. In: Burnautzki/