Writing Against Death

Aims to re-evaluate Simone de Beauvoir's extensive autobiographical ouvre, exploring its place in relation to the French autobiographical canon. This study presents readings, which engage critically with existentialism, feminist theory, and autobiographystudies generally, in particular focusing on the question of 'autothanatography'.

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Essays. AGAINST DEATH is an anthology of creative non-fiction exploring the psychological shifts that occur when we prematurely or unexpectedly confront death. AGAINST DEATH is a natural outgrowth of the editor's experience of surviving a vertebral artery dissection and stroke and the subsequent writing of a long poem memoir about the event. To be "against" something can mean two different things at the same time. "Against" can mean pressed up close to something, yet it can also signify refusal. These texts deal with the affects of this proximity, taking into account any meaning of the word. Rather than showcase only extreme survival stories or difficult biological situations, the pieces in AGAINST DEATH consider the ways we make sense of death on a personal level and how we integrate that thinking as we continue forward. AGAINST DEATH articulates the personal experiences of each author's "near-deathness," utilizing fresh and inventive language to represent what "magical thinking" proposes. These pieces are incisive and articulate, avoiding the usual platitudes, feel-good bromides, and pep talks associated with near-death encounters. The writing moves past the sob story and confronts the tough circumstance of facing death with truth and compassion, no matter how ugly or (in)convenient. Contributors include: angela rawlings, Joe Average, Aislinn Hunter, Jennifer van Evra, Maureen Medved, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Bruce Meyer, and many others.

This comprehensive critique explores the relevancy of old discourses for contemporary narratives in ten Israeli novels. How the theory of deconstruction affects the future of a nation as presented in aspects of these literary texts is the focus of this book. The texts represent the meeting of ancient lore and modern narrative, as well as the conflict between a demanding past and the threat implied in an open future. The fragmentary quality of Israeli fiction denies the guarantee of unity and contravenes a fixed interpretative contextual discourse. The major tensions that call for a repositioning of critical standpoints underlie the textual contradictions that pose existential crises for their protagonists and an exciting challenge for the reader.

Aims to re-evaluate Simone de Beauvoir's extensive autobiographical ouvre, exploring its place in relation to the French autobiographical canon. This study presents readings, which engage critically with existentialism, feminist theory, and autobiographystudies generally, in particular focusing on the question of 'autothanatography'.

An account of the 1955 car-racing season, noted as one of the sport's most violent years, profiles the dispossessed young men who competed against themselves and each other from the perspective of a fictional narrator, in a volume that draws on the author's interviews with surviving racers, mechanics, and historians. Reprint.

"Ask not for whom the bell tolls... Eulogy: one of the many English words combining legein (to gather together) and logos (the word, the law). With eulogy though the speech-act itself is all important (eu-) and its impossibility evident in a written work. The site of the gathering together of words, of scattered sounds, disappears in the act of writing, itself scatter -- all too forcefully underlining the cause, the event of dispersion that creates the need for gathering together. Jeremy Fernando s eulogy, this particular eulogy, is called Writing Death, and it reminds us that eulogy in its impossibility may well be the primary genre of writing. Writing and death have always gone together, hence Plato s suspicions of chirographic technologies. The author is absent, as is the subject. The text brooks no questions and gives no answers. Fernando s gathering of scatterings in the form of mini-meditations unfolds the weaving of textus that makes writing possible and makes death comprehensible in all of its paradoxical mystery and awe-ful presence. His is a book of catalysts: use them with care. -- Ryan Bishop, Professor of Global Arts and Politics, the Winchester School of Art, the University of Southampton

A philosopher refutes our culturally embedded acceptance of death, arguing instead for the desirability of anti-aging science and radical life extension. Ingemar Patrick Linden’s central claim is that death is evil. In this first comprehensive refutation of the most common arguments in favor of human mortality, he writes passionately in favor of antiaging science and radical life extension. We may be on the cusp of a new human condition where scientists seek to break through the arbitrarily set age limit of human existence to address aging as an illness that can be cured. The book, however, is not about the science and technology of life extension but whether we should want more life. For Linden, the answer is a loud and clear “yes.” The acceptance of death is deeply embedded in our culture. Linden examines the views of major philosophical voices of the past, whom he calls “death’s ardent advocates.” These include the Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Lucretius, and Montaigne. All have taught what he calls “the Wise View,” namely, that we should not fear death. After setting out his case against death, Linden systematically examines each of the accepted arguments for death—that aging and death are natural, that death is harmless, that life is overrated, that living longer would be boring, and that death saves us from overpopulation. He concludes with a “dialogue concerning the badness of human mortality.” Though Linden acknowledges that The Case Against Death is a negative polemic, he also defends it as optimistic, in that the badness of death is a function of the goodness of life.

A fable, parable, and confession, the second novel from the acclaimed author of The Meursault Investigation pays homage to the essential need for fiction and to the freedom from tradition afforded by an adopted language. Having lost his mother and been shunned by his father, Zabor grows up in the company of books, which teach him a new language. Ever since he can remember, he has been convinced that he has a gift: if he writes, he will stave off death; those captured in the sentences of his notebooks will live longer. Like a kind of inverted Scheherazade saving his fellow men, he experiments night after night with the delirious power of the imagination. Then, one night, his estranged half brother and the other relatives who would disown him come knocking at the door: his father is going to die and perhaps only Zabor is capable of delaying that fateful moment. Sitting next to the father who has ostracized him, the son writes compulsively, retracing an existence characterized by strangeness, abandonment, and humiliation, but also by wondrous encounters with fictional worlds that he alone in the entire village can access.

Death is an inevitable, yet mysterious event. Fiction is one way to imagine and gain knowledge of death. Death is very useful to literature, as it creates plot twists, suspense, mysteries, and emotional effects in narrations. But more importantly, stories about death seem to have an existential importance to our lives. Stories provide fictional encounters with death and give meaning for both death and life. Thus, death is more than a physical or psychological experience in literature; it also highlights existential questions concerning humanity and storytelling. This volume, entitled Death in Literature, approaches death by examining the narratives and spectacles of death, dying and mortality in different literary genres. The articles consider literary representations of death from ancient Rome to the Netherlands today, and explore ways of dealing with death and dying. The discussions also transcend the boundaries of literature by studying literary representations of such socially relevant and death-related issues as euthanasia and suicide. The articles offer a broad perspective on death’s role in literature as well as literature’s role in the social and cultural debates about death.

The first full-length biography of one of the most unlikely figures in twentieth-century American literature, a writer who emerged from a dirt-poor South Georgia tenant farm and went on to create a singularly unique voice of fiction.

"Splendid" —New York Times "Mind-bending." —Wall Street Journal "Brilliantly original. The best new novel I've read this year." —Salman Rushdie A daring, kaleidoscopic novel about the clash of empires and ideas, told through a tennis match in the sixteenth century between the radical Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo, played with a ball made from the hair of the beheaded Anne Boleyn. The poet and the artist battle it out in Rome before a crowd that includes Galileo, a Mary Magdalene, and a generation of popes who would throw the world into flames. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII execute Anne Boleyn, and her crafty executioner transforms her legendary locks into those most-sought-after tennis balls. Across the ocean in Mexico, the last Aztec emperors play their own games, as the conquistador Hernán Cortés and his Mayan translator and lover, La Malinche, scheme and conquer, fight and f**k, not knowing that their domestic comedy will change the course of history. In a remote Mexican colony a bishop reads Thomas More’s Utopia and thinks that it’s a manual instead of a parody. And in today’s New York City, a man searches for answers to impossible questions, for a book that is both an archive and an oracle. Álvaro Enrigue’s mind-bending story features assassinations and executions, hallucinogenic mushrooms, bawdy criminals, carnal liaisons and papal schemes, artistic and religious revolutions, love and war. A blazingly original voice and a postmodern visionary, Enrigue tells the grand adventure of the dawn of the modern era, breaking down traditions and upending expectations, in this bold, powerful gut-punch of a novel. Game, set, match. “Sudden Death is the best kind of puzzle, its elements so esoteric and wildly funny that readers will race through the book, wondering how Álvaro Enrigue will be able to pull a novel out of such an astonishing ball of string. But Enrigue absolutely does; and with brilliance and clarity and emotional warmth all the more powerful for its surreptitiousness.” —Lauren Groff, New York Times-bestselling author of Fates and Furies "Engrossing... rich with Latin and European history." —The New Yorker "[A] bawdy, often profane, sprawling, ambitious book that is as engaging as it is challenging.” —Vogue

Time and the literary: the immediacy of information technology has supposedly annihilated both. Email, cell phones, satellite broadcasting seem to have ended the long-standing tradition of encoding our experience of time through writing. Paul de Man's seminal essay "Literary History and Literary Modernity" and newly commissioned essays on everything from the human genome to grammatical tenses argue, however that the literary constantly reconstructs our understanding of time. From eleventh-century France or a science-fiction future, Time and the Literary shows how these two concepts have been and will continue to influence each other.