Grief and Comparative Literature

Abstract

Grief is defined as “very great sadness, especially at the death of someone” (Cambridge Dictionary). Studying grief entails digging into the very meaning of bereavement, its impact on human behavior and on relationships and interactions, and excavating its unbearable nature. Rodgers and Cowles’s article “The Concept of Grief: An Analysis of Classical and Contemporary Thought” (cited under General Overviews) is an attempt to understand the very meaning of grief as a concept. Grief indeed is a widely explored topic in literature as it pertains to death studies and is affiliated with literature of loss, literary grief, and literature and emotions. In Death Representations in Literature (under Death Studies), Adriana Teodorescu examines the way death is dealt with in literature. She digs into death studies as a field to highlight how literature portrays human conditions and allows us to be aware of our humanity, highlighting the challenging role of literature as means of survival. Grief across literature(s) and culture(s) is examined through Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning (under Comparative Literature: On Mourning and Grief (Grief across Literature[s] and Culture[s])) by Nouri Gana, who analyzes the significance of loss and its impact on human life and psyche, by referring to selected works by James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Elias Khoury, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida. Other publications advocating a comparative approach to understanding grief are Jennifer Rushworth’s Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust and the anthology The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature edited by Wang, Jernigan, and Murphy (both cited under Comparative Literature: On Mourning and Grief (Grief across Literature[s] and Culture[s])). This research will have a particular focus on grief and comparative literature; it will provide an overview on bereavement as a field of study, theorizing it as a concept, examining its manifestations and rituals in different cultures and writings, and citing different narratives dealing with grief across literatures and cultures, such as the works of Atiq Rahimi, Elif Shafak, Nureddin Farah, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Young Keving, and Taher Ben Jelloun. It will also shed light on how literature and writing could be a way of coping with sorrow and grief. A compilation of works published by specialists in the field is shared at the end of the article, such as Fulton’s Death, Grief, and Bereavement: A Bibliography, 1845–1975 and Szabo’s Death and Dying: An Annotated Bibliography of the Thanatological Literature (both under Bibliographies).