Haunting Books: mourning and afterlife in literature

Catalog description

In this course we will look at a selection of texts, some very familiar, others rarer, drawn from the Bible and Greek tragedy, Sci-fi and Yiddish modernist ghost stories, French post-structuralism and Polish cinema, in order to examine the writing of grief and the representation of mourning in literature. We will look at grieving as a social practice, a prescribed behavior that is supposed to achieve certain results and in which one can fail.