Dead Friend Research Articles

Finding Thomas Merton

Finding Thomas Merton

Jacques Derrida’s (Art)Work of Mourning

AbstractDerrida’s highly personal mourning texts are collected and published in a unique book under the titleThe Work of Mourningedited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, two outstanding translators of Derrida’s works. The English collection is published in 2001, while the French edition came out later in 2003 titledChaque fois unique, la fin du monde(Each Time Unique, the End of the World). In hisdeconstructed eulogies, Derrida, being in accordance with ‘the mission impossible’ of deconstruction, namely, ‘to allow the coming of the entirely other’ in its otherness, seems to find his own voice. In my paper, I will focus on this special segment of Derrida’s death-work (cf. life-work); namely, on his mourning texts writtenforhis dead friends, paying special attention to the rhetoric ‘circling around’ fidelity, friendship, and the other in histextualmourning.

Bill: A Portrait of Discontinuties

A dialogue and a reflection are offered as a way of structuring the author’s thoughts about the life and personality of a dead friend (the dialogue), and his reflection on why he wrote the first dialogue as he did. In particular, the dialogue seeks to present the dead man as confusing to ‘read’. The reflection considers how much attention is given in the first to different aspects of the friend’s life, and offers possible reasons for these choices. Reasons include the personal characteristics of the author highlighted by his friendship with the dead man, and the author’s wish to reflect obliquely something of the felt experience of being the dead man’s friend. This dialogue was submitted to EJLW on August 7th, and published on April 9th 2017. Arthur Halliday is a pseudonym.

Sounding Death, Saying Something

This essay considers what it means to speak into an absence. In particular, the author thinks about a series of recordings from the 1960s in which Inuit in Arctic Canada send messages to their relatives in tuberculosis sanatoria in southern Canada. The dislocation such separation caused was severe. Families who had never been apart were separated for years with little means of communication. Some Inuit died in the sanatoria. Family members had no way of knowing whether the absent were alive or dead. Many had a hard time finding words to speak into the recorder. Nonetheless, they lent their voices to the project. By juxtaposing these “soundings” with dreams Inuit youth have of their dead friends, the author thinks about the possibility of “sending” our voices to the absent/dead and the way they send their voices to us.

Arıstoteles'in Solon'u: mutluluk ve akıbeti üzerine

The research subject of the rst book of Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics is happiness (eudaimonia). While carrying out his research with the arguments which are the most common or seem the most fundemental ones, Aristotle draws conclusion that in order to consider someone happy, his virtue and his life has to be looked as a whole. This conclusion leads us that we could not call someone happy while he is alive. This article, focusing on how Aristotle tries to combine his theory of happiness with the conclusion which is known to belong Solon, aims to reveal Aristotle's views about whether or not the happiness of anyone, who has completed his life as happy person, remains open to changes by circumstances befalling on his friends or his descedants. Aristotle could not say that fortunes of the happy dead's descedants or friends have any inuence on him although he does not think that the happiness or unhappiness of someone can be changed after his death. In this study, the background efforts of the philosopher on combining his happiness theory with Solon's dictum is tired to reveal while benetting from interpretations of comtemporaneous researchers on this ambivalent statement.

Commémorer à Cluny (xie-xiie siècles). Une mise en perspective anthropologique et historique

The memory of ancestors and of dead friends is an key feature of human existance across civilisations. From the third century onwards, the christian church developed a very concrete idea of the after-life which could serve as a consolation remedy for survivors : the commemoration of the dead by prayers and good works for the salvation of souls. The sources created for the practice of liturgical memory enable the historian to study the different elements of this medieval peculiarity, for example, proposopraphy, social relations, the economy, property transfers, popular piety and charity towards the poor. Supported by effective propaganda and based on visions of the after-life, it was primarily the abbey of Cluny which proposed tariff-gradated prayer to the faithful, which contributed to the enormous success of the congregation of Cluny throughout Europe.

László Mednyánszky

This article offers an analysis of the diaries of Hungarian Painter László Mednyánszky. The diaries document how Mednyánszky’s visual creativity was influenced by a conundrum of his religious, philosophical and political views and also of his contradictory social and personal identities. Mednyánszky was (1) a Hungarian living in an ethnically Slovak neighbourhood; (2) an aristocrat reflecting the decadence of his class; (3) an adherent of alternative religiosity (theosophy); (4) a homosexual creating a personal myth of paranormal coexistence with his dead friend. Standing in this complex mental crossroads, Mednyánszky represents a unique case in his social and cultural environment. The only possible contextualization of personality and creativity, both artistic and religious, leads to the cultural anthropology of Edward Carpenter and to the trans-cultural archetype of “myths of divinised dead friends”.

Did the 2011 Terror Attacks in Norway Change Citizens’ Attitudes Toward Immigrants?

In the afternoon of July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb near the central government building in Oslo, Norway, killing eight people. About an hour later, he arrived, disguised as a policeman, at the social democratic summer camp on the small island of Utøya near Oslo, shooting another 69 people, mostly teenagers. The survivors hid in bushes, played dead beside their dead friends, or swam to the mainland. In the morning of the next day, the police announced that Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian islamophobic right-wing extremist, had been arrested for the attacks. The terror attacks received a lot of attention in both the international and Norwegian press.1 According to the compendium of texts, which he distributed on the web a few hours before the attacks, Breivik regarded Islam as the main enemy and argued for the deportation of all Muslims from Europe (Kremer, Stigset, & Treloar, 2011). The political debate in the aftermath of the attacks was calm and temperate, and the media coverage in Norway of the ruling social democratic party and the prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, has been characterized as objective and positive (Bihlar & Brathell, 2011).2 In this article, we examine whether the attacks had observable effects on Norwegians’ attitudes toward immigrants.

FRIENDSHIP, MODERNITY, AND ELEGIAC TRADITION

5 6 Y F R I E N D S H I P , M O D E R N I T Y , A N D E L E G I A C T R A D I T I O N R O N A L D A . S H A R P One of the bitterest complaints in Dr. Johnson’s infamous attack on ‘‘Lycidas’’ is that Milton’s pastoral elegy ‘‘excite[s] no sympathy ’’ for the poet’s dead friend. Whereas in Cowley’s ‘‘On the Death of Mr. William Harvey,’’ ‘‘It is easy to suppose how much he must miss the companion of his labors and the partner of his discoveries,’’ in ‘‘Lycidas,’’ according to Johnson, one is never made to feel Milton’s sense of loss. Leaving aside the vexed issues of artistic sincerity and authenticity implicit in Johnson’s critique – to say nothing of his generic distaste for modern pastoral – I would like to suggest that his assumptions about friendship raise important issues that have been ignored by critics of the elegiac tradition. For Johnson seems to be assuming that it is appropriate for a critic to evaluate how successfully an actual friendship has been represented in a poem. The silence of most subsequent critics on this issue seems to be based on the assumption that Dr. Johnson is wrong, and that it is inappropriate to inquire about, let alone evaluate, the rendering of friendship in an elegy written about a friend. Perhaps it is time to reopen that question. Is there not an important distinction to be made between an 5 7 R elegy written about a genuine friend and one about an acquaintance ? Perhaps one reason the representation of friendship in ‘‘Lycidas’’ may seem inadequate is that Edward King was merely an acquaintance of Milton’s and not a friend. Does it make sense, to take another famous example, to continue to treat ‘‘Adonais’’ as though it were an elegy written by one friend about another? Shelley and Keats knew each other; they even spent a few evenings together, and Shelley made an extremely kind invitation to Keats. But they were scarcely friends. As a serious thinker about friendship himself, whose Rambler and Idler essays on the subject are among the best we have, Dr. Johnson would have read ‘‘Lycidas’’ not simply as a pastoral elegy but also as part of the long tradition of the literature of friendship. Johnson erred not by attempting to read the poem in the context of friendship but rather by failing to recognize that there is a species of pastoral elegy that employs the death of a friend or acquaintance merely as a conventional springboard to a meditation about poetry, death, and ultimate meaning. In such poems – ‘‘Adonais’’ is another good example – the reader ought to expect neither serious reflection about friendship generally nor a deeply felt rendering of the relationship with the dead friend. Such poems are occasions for writing about death and loss, not friendship. But Johnson’s impulse is not entirely misguided, for there is another kind of elegy in which the death of a friend, far from functioning merely as a conventional point of departure, is felt in the most deeply personal way, and in which friendship does indeed share center stage with death. Critics who approach these poems generically, in relation to the conventions of the elegy but in ignorance of that other rich but forgotten tradition, are bound to miss important dimensions of these works. To understand those elegies it is appropriate to consider the context of the literature of friendship, and all the more so since there is a deep and longstanding association of death and friendship that runs through that tradition. In fact, one of the defining features of the literature of friendship is its preoccupation with the conjunction of the two. If we are to understand the importance of friendship to the modern elegy we must first understand that the connection of death and friendship has been at the foundation of serious reflection about friendship for centuries. 5 8 S H A R P Y The immediate concern of Laelius’s discourse on friendship, which...

WAITING FOR THE POLITICAL MOMENT

The political moment: a moment when being in the world becomes being for the world. Strangely and painfully, it is like death: physically no longer in the world, the dead friend and colleague leaves the trace that is for the world, a gift, for us to do with what he wanted to do with but is now no longer able to. His work is a trace of the same order as the material images from the past the presence of which for the world is so important to us. Jose Luis Brea: an intellectual leader in visual studies in Spain and beyond, once given a limitation to his time in the world, decided to double his efforts and do three things that mattered to him.

Suttree's Dead Acquaintances and McCarthy's Dead Friends

Hey Hatmaker. Tell Hoghead and Donald and Byrd and Bobby and Hugh and Conrad and all of em that they aint barred.They're dead. (Suttree 456)The quoted selection above mentions six of Cornelius Suttree's dead acquaintances in a scene relating a typhoid fever-induced hallucination or dream in Suttree by Cormac McCarthy. Hoghead, Byrd and Bobby have all been introduced previously and should be familiar to careful readers of the novel. On the other hand, Donald, Hugh and Conrad appear out of the blue and are mentioned for the first and only time in this single sentence. The action is set in the spring or summer of 1955 in the Huddle tavern where Ernest Hatmaker is the proprietor.The remainder of this paper will present historical and biographical information concerning the lives of the real Knoxville people upon whom these characters seem to be based. It will conclude with some speculations about McCarthy's motivation for writing of these deaths near the end of his novel.HogheadHoghead Henry is first encountered in the book along with J-Bone and Boneyard at a table at the rear of the Sanitary Lunch as Suttree joins the group. After eating, the group adjourns to the Huddle tavern (70-75). Suttree next encounters Hoghead on the street as Hoghead is in the process of delivering some punchboards (109). Hoghead is then found with the hearts from McAnally in a fight at the Indian Rock roadhouse (185) and is seen in Suttree's dream in the hospital as Suttree recovers from his floorbuffer induced head injury (189). Later Hoghead is mentioned as having drunk whisky with Leonard (243), standing on the corner with Bucket and Bobbyjohn (301), and among the drinkers in the Buffalo Room (384). Suttree reads of Hoghead's death in the newspaper while drinking coffee at the EE with reddish blonde hair and freckles. His head did look a little large for his body and I guess that is where the name came from although I never (Caldwell 20 Feb. 2005). He had strawberry blonde hair that was very thin which he wore cut in flat top, but his hair was so fine it would not stand up. He had freckles, and he was always laughing and acting silly (Caldwell 5 Mar. 2005).The account of Jimmy Henry's death makes a story good enough for McCarthy to have retold it in the novel. A few of the details were included in an early draft of the book found in the Cormac McCarthy Papers at Texas State University but were not used in the final version of the book. Around 8:30 a.m. on the morning of August 13, 1955, red-haired Vicki White and blond-headed Jimmy Henry were in an upstairs apartment at 203 Twelfth Street. According to Vicki they decided to play Russian Roulette after a night of heavy drinking. Jimmy had a gun and Vicki asked him to let her shoot it. He then unloaded the gun and gave it to her. Vicki put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger two or three times, and then handed it to Jimmy. He pulled the trigger a couple of times and the gun fired she said. The 38-caliber slug entered Jimmy's right temple and emerged from the top of his head. …

Writing, Remembering and Embodiment: Australian Literary Responses to the First World War

This paper is part of a larger project exploring Australian literary responses to the Great War of 1914-1918. It draws on theories of embodiment, mourning, ritual and the recuperative potential of writing, together with a brief discussion of selected exemplars, to suggest that literary works of the period contain and lay bare a suite of creative, corporeal and social impulses, including resurrection, placation or stilling of ghosts, and formation of an empathic and duty-bound community.

Milton's Epitaphium Damonis: The Debt to Neo-Latin Poets

Epitaphium Damonis, Milton's lament for his friend Charles Diodati, is usually described as most strongly indebted to Theocritus’ idylls, to Virgil's eclogues, and to Ovid's lament for Tibullus. However, closer examination reveals that Milton was even more closely indebted to Neo-Latin poets such as Sannazaro, Buchanan, Castiglione, Mantuan, and Zanchi. Whereas there are lines in Epitaphium Damonis that resemble those in Virgil and Ovid, there are just as many that resemble those in Neo-Latin poets. Although a pastoral, the tone and atmosphere of the epitaph resemble more its Renaissance contemporaries than its more distant Latin and Greek forebears. This is especially evident in the intimate tone Milton assumes in addressing Damon-Diodati and in the elaborate digression he incorporates into the poem when he confides to his dead friend his plans for a future epic on an Arthurian theme. Milton's attempt to wed a Christian sensibility to a classical form also signals his indebtedness to his Renaissance predecessors, who similarly used classical pastoral to express Christian consolation.

Rafael Alberti in Post-Exile

Rafael Alberti returned to Spain in 1977, after four decades of exile. This article examines the effects that Alberti's return had on his poetry. In exile, Alberti had imagined his homecoming as the moment in which he would be able to break the ostracism that the dictatorship forced on the Republican intellectuals. However, the works that Alberti wrote after 1977 reveal his comeback as a complex and uneasy experience. Despite his euphoric return to post-Franco Spain and his attempts to reconnect with his fellow citizens from the democratic present, Alberti ended up frequently choosing his dead friends as his true addressees. This article argues that, in order to understand Alberti's obligation towards the past in his late works, it is crucial to acknowledge the relevance of the ethical awakening that the Spanish Civil War and exile provoked in his subjectivity and his writing.Rafael Alberti regreso a Espana en 1977, despues de cuatro decadas de exilio. Este articulo estudia los efectos que provoco el regr...

Michel de Montaigne : Du Discours sur la mort de La Boétie aux Essais

Montaigne prefaces the works of Etienne de la Boétie with a letter that Montaigne supposedly wrote shortly after the sudden death of his friend, whose last enigmatic words to Montaigne were: “make a place for me”. A close examination of the intertexts and rhetoric of the letter reveals that it can be read as a failed attempt by Montaigne to respond to his friend’s wish. The letter, indeed, fails to offer a true literary place to his friend who ceased to be a privileged addressee or reader, to become an absent object of discourse mentioned in the third person. Montaigne will try to “make a place” for his dead friend elsewhere, while writing his Essais, by developing a polyphonic mode of writing functioning as a substitute to the lost friendship. It will be argued that in the Essais, friendship, more that a mere content of discourse, becomes a form of expression.

Seneca’s Presence in Pliny’s Epistle 1. 12

Abstract In his exitus letter on the death of Corellius Rufus (Ep. 1. 12), Pliny attempts to present his dead friend with Stoic characteristics. Not only does Corellius follow the Stoic view on suicide in the case of an incurable disease, but also he is implicitly compared to the Stoic sapiens. This is greatly facilitated by allusions to Seneca’s Epistulae Morales, and in particular to epistle 85, where the sapiens is described and dolor is presented as indifferent to the pursuit of virtus. These allusions allow Pliny to both praise Corellius and at the same time express his objections to the prose consolationes of his predecessors.

Review essay: Spectacle, apocalypse and the telepathic fruitarian pacifists from Mars

Atlantis (August Blom Denmark 1913). Danish Film Institute. PAL region 0. Original ratio. 20fps.Verdens undergang (The End of the World; August Blom 1916) and Himmelskibet (A Trip to Mars; Forest Holger-Madsen Denmark 1918). Danish Film Institute. PAL region 0. Original ratio. 17fps and 20fps, respectively.For half a decade, beginning in 1910, Denmark was the most influential filmmaking nation in Europe after France. Of more than two dozen production companies, many of which lasted only long enough to make a handful of films, Nordisk Films Kompagni was the most successful.1 Established in 1906 by cinema-owner Ole Olsen, it quickly became the second largest European production company, after France's Pathe,2 making, for example, over 140 films in 1915 alone. Indeed, Nordisk's fame and influence was such that the Hungarian theatrical actor and film director Mihaley Kertesz - better known as Michael Curtiz - visited Denmark to study their filmmaking systems and techniques.3 Nordisk ceased to make films in 1917, and when production recommenced after World War One, its global position was lost. Its German market was undermined by the establishment of Ufa, Germany's state-owned studio, and Nordisk's increasing focus on literary adaptations proved a less-successful export strategy than Germany's development of expressionism into a cinematic mode.In 1910, actor August Blom joined Nordisk's 1700 staff as a director.4 He soon became the studio's leading director, shooting more than a hundred films by 1924. While Olsen preferred single reel films (up to sixteen minutes long), which had to sell about twenty prints before turning a profit, Blom wished to make longer films. After his racy three-reel melodrama Val Foengslets Port (The Temptations of a Great City; Denmark 1911) became an international hit, selling nearly 250 copies, he increasingly got his way. Although largely forgotten nowadays, Blom was a major figure in the development of what we now think of as feature-length films, both in Denmark and internationally. He was best known for literary adaptations, including versions of Robinson Crusoe, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and a Hamlet shot at Elsinore, and for social melodramas, which depicted temporary mobility between social classes before conservatively reasserting the natural order of social hierarchies (Mottram 135-6). In 1913, he adapted German Nobel Prize-winner Gerhart Hauptmann's novel Atlantis, following its narrative very closely. It was a prestige production over which Hauptman retained considerable control; but despite the novel's rather modern perspective, its story of the self-exiled, proto-existentialist Dr Friedrich von Kammacher (Olaf Fonss) resonated strongly with the melodramatic form Blom favoured. At eight reels (nearly two hours), it was the longest Danish film - and one of the longest films anywhere - to that date. It was another international hit, with prints prepared specifically for Danish, German, English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian language markets (there were two Russian versions, one with a much more tragic conclusion which is included as an extra on this DVD). For its US release, it was cut down to six-reels. According to Mottram, the excised scenes almost certainly included von Kammacher's side trip to Paris and his brief shipboard affair with a Russian Jewess from steerage, and probably the two-shot sequence which gives the film its title and its few moments of more-or-less direct interest to readers of this journal: von Kammacher's dream/ vision of Atlantis.Nearly halfway through the film, the overwrought von Kammacher retreats to his cabin on a liner crossing the Atlantic to the US. In his sleep, he meets a dead friend with whom he walks through the streets of Atlantis. While Blom succeeds in giving this sequence an oneiric quality, the lost continent is rather obviously just a Danish town. This tension makes it appear oddly prescient of Ingmar Bergman's symbolic use of Scandinavian settings in a film such as Smultronstallet (Wild Strawberries; Sweden 1957), but it is profoundly at odds with the rest of the film's realist aesthetics. …

‘Great friends’: Creating legacies, networks and policies that perpetuate the memory of the Fathers of Europe

This article highlights the uses of friendship by associations that perpetuate the memory of the Fathers of Europe. It demonstrates that the invention of the tradition of the ‘Fathers of Europe’ is not the monopoly of European institutions. It was made possible by the mobilization of associations of heirs that have perpetuated these Fathers’ memory since the 1960s. From a social history perspective, the article analyzes some case studies that show how associations of friends devoted to the Fathers of Europe have been created, and what kind of activities they have led throughout time. International friendship emerges as a set of reconstructed memories through the practices of the transnational spheres, by transforming a dead friend into an exemplary friend in order to legitimize a certain vision of the European past.

A textual analysis of memorials written by bereaved individuals and families in a hospice context

This article illustrates ways in which individuals and families memorialise dead family and friends through writing. St Christopher's Hospice chapel contains a ‘Tree of Life’ onto which paper ‘leaves’, written by individuals or families, can be attached. Twelve months after a bereavement, a Thanksgiving and Memorial Service is held and families and individuals are invited to write on an A5 piece of paper (T&M slip) sentiments or thoughts pertinent to the deceased. Both sets of writing which were collected and analysed in this study indicate a process of memorialisation and remembrance which is personal and descriptive and yet, because of the ultimate placing of the writing, quasi public. Some choose to write extensive pieces while others short sentences, but there are common themes to them in both content and style. The results of the analysis indicate that this writing forms a memorialisation process which, whilst unique for the individuals or family concerned, are common to all whose writings. Further, the analysis of the results indicates that recent models of bereavement can be seen through written memorials.

Sign Here If You Exist

S 63 The female giant ichneumon wasp flies, impressively for her near-eight-inch length, with the light buoyancy of cottonwood fluff, seemingly without direction, simply aloft. Despite her remarkable size, she is not bulky. Her three-part body makes up only about three inches of her total length, and is disproportionately slender; her thorax is connected to her abdomen by a Victorian-thin waist. Most of her maximum, eight-inch span consists of an ovipositor half that length which extends from the tip of her abdomen and trails behind her like a thread loose from a pant hem. Fully extended, she can be nearly as long as your Peterson’s Field Guide to Insects. ign Here If You Exist . . . Jill Sisson Quinn nonfiction S 64 ecotone Her overall appearance of fragility—the corseted middle, the filamentous tail—portrays in flight a facade of drifting. But both of the times I have seen a giant ichneumon wasp she was on a mission, in search of something very specific: a single species among the 1,017,018 described species of insects in the world (91,000 in the United States, 18,000 in Wisconsin, where I observed my second giant ichneumon). To comprehend this statistic, there are many things one needs to know: the definition of an insect, Linnaean taxonomy, the function of zero, the imaginary borders of states and countries. The female ichneumon wasp knows none of this. Yet it can locate a larva of the pigeon horntail— a type of wood wasp whose living body will nourish her developing young—hidden two inches deep in the wood of a dead tree, in the middle of a forest. Charles Darwin himself, it turns out, studied the ichneumon wasp. He mentions it specifically in an 1860 letter to biologist Asa Gray, a proponent of the idea that nature reveals God’s benevolence. Darwin, on the other hand, swayed no doubt by the rather macabre details of this parasitic insect’s life, writes: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars”—and then, as if to reach the layman, he adds, “Or that a cat should play with mice.” The tabby that curls in your lap and licks your temple, after all, has likely batted a live mouse between its paws until its brain swelled and burst. And the larvae of the giant ichneumon wasp eat, from the inside out and over the course of an entire season, the living bodies of the larvae of a fellow insect. Like Darwin, I think I have put to rest my belief in a beneficent and omnipotent God, in any God really. Contrary to what I once believed, it is easy to let go of God, whose essence has never been more than ethereal anyway, expanding like an escaping gas into the corners of whatever church you happened to attend, into the breath of whatever frightened, gracious, or insomnious prayer you found yourself emitting. But it is much more difficult to truly put to rest the belief in an afterlife, A lack of the divine probably means that when you die what you consider your essence will cease to exist. 65 jill sisson quinn the kind where you might get to visit with all your dead friends and relatives. It will not be easy to let go of your deceased mother, who stands in her kitchen slicing potatoes and roast, who hacks ice from the sidewalk with shovels; she is marrow and bone, a kernel of morals, values, and lessons compacted like some astronomical amount of matter into tablespoons, one with sugar for your cereal, another, for your fever, with a crushed aspirin and orange juice. You love her. You mark time and space by her: she is someone you are always either near to or very far from. Can people live without the comfort of a creator? I think so. But relinquishing God—the Christian God, at least—does not leave everything else intact. A lack of the divine probably means that when you die what you consider your essence will cease to...