Graves, Bodies, and Books: Funerary Commemorations from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century

Catalog description

In 2014, the start-up company Eterni.me began offering its services to preserve deceased loved ones as 3-D avatars. In the first four days of its existence, the company registered 3,000 people on its site and, consequently, joined the ranks of many other companies in the “e-death” industry that promise to prolong the life of a family member or friend beyond biological death. Companies like Eterni.me—and the digital age, more generally—will surely change the way that societies commemorate their dead; yet humans have always named their dead and marked their final resting places with a monument to ensure that they will be remembered beyond a single generation. We explore the human tendency to locate the dead in society and to engage with them postmortem through a series of literary case studies with a focus on the commemoration of deceased poets, and ask why it is that poets’ tombs are the destination of much literary tourism. Who visits poets’ tombs? What do they do there? How does the tomb help ensure a poet’s “immortality” after his biological death? To answer these and similar questions we study ancient Greek and Latin poetry and the tombs that ancient poets imagine for themselves in their verse. We then turn to a selection of funerary monuments dedicated to Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic poets. Finally, we will consider the twenty-first century’s evolving relationship to traditional modes of commemoration, as well as to digital and experimental forms of memorialization. Authors include: Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Voltaire, Keats, Shelley.