medieval death syllabus

Can death be represented? How do we think and form aesthetic relationships with what defies representation? While few things can be said to be as certain than the fact that our lives will end, Sigmund Freud nonetheless famously observed that it is “impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators.”¹ It’s a rather medieval observation – he even ends that same essay with an invocation of the medieval memento mori: si vis vitam, para mortem, that is, to endure life, prepare for death. For as central to our allegedly secular, allegedly scientific modernity as Freud’s observations about the unconscious have been, the comment gestures towards an understanding of life that is deeply structured by something that we can’t actually fully imagine or represent – however obsessively we may think around, or, as it may happen, be surrounded by it.

One central concern of this class, then, is to approach death as a question of form. What form of thought, of articulation, of living, or of expression is appropriate for orienting oneself towards death? Is it the task of literature, art, philosophy, and other forms of speculative thought to console us and prepare us for death? Or is there a deeper, less utilitarian, sense in which they can bring thought to its own limits of signification and representability without eliminating it?

assignments

Memento mori journal:
- Designate a journal, a folder in your notes app, or the like to be your memento mori journal. Each week, record at least one moment in which you were reminded of your own mortality, in which something’s finitude felt “real” for a moment, or encountered an object which in one way or another functioned as a memento mori. Write it down for later, no more than a sentence or two. When you have fifteen idle minutes, circle one word from the note you wrote and set a timer. Try your best to write nonstop until the timer goes off, describing a scene around the word you chose. It may be fictional, or an attempt at reconstructing the moment or encounter, a mixture of both, or something else entirely (whatever keeps your thought going). Bring whatever you’ve written to class every Friday morning.

Essay Exam: Self-constructed essay exam
Final Essay

reading schedule

week one: approaching negativity

Introductions, syllabus overview, resources

Readings:

Vance Smith, “Literature and Death” and “Out of Death, Art of Dying,” from Arts of Dying (optional: “Unearthly Earth: Mortuary Lyric”)
Michael Camille, “A Gap in the Text,” from Master of Death
Jacqueline Rose, “A Postscript on Black Holes,” from Why War?
Anonymous, Earth, from British Library MS Harley 913 (“The Harley Lyrics”)
Anonymous, A mirror for young ladies at their toilet
Anonymous, A warning spoken by the soul of a dead person

week two: dead can dance

Readings

John Lydgate, Dance of Death (B-version), Cook and Strakhov introduction
Elina Gertsman, “Pleyinge and Peyntynge: Performing the Dance of Death”
Amy Appleford, “Dying Generations” (from Learning to Die in London)

week three: vision and dialectic i

Readings:

Anicius Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy

week four: vision and dialectic ii

Readings

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess
Julie Orlemanski, “The Heaviness of Prosopopoeial Form in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess”

week five: looking for death

Essay exam due

Readings:

Chaucer, from The Canterbury Tales:
- General Prologue ll.1-42, 669-746.
- Pardoner's Prologue and Tale

Optional

Carolyn Dinshaw, “Eunuch Hermeneutics” (from Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics)
D. Vance Smith, "Alway deynge and be not ded" (from Arts of Dying)

week six: mourning

Readings:

Anonymous, Pearl

week seven: eros, joy, and despair

Readings:

Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus

week eight: reckoning with life

Readings:

Gillian Rose, Love's Work

notes

^{1. Freud, The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works, 14:289.↩}