Thanatografické psaní. Vyprávění o lásce, smrti a smutku

• Authors: Musil Jan

Title variants

EN

Thanatography: Stories of Love, Death, and Mourning

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

This study develops the concept of ‘thanatography’ as an umbrella term for the marginalized corpus of autobiographical prose texts dealing with the death and mourning of a loved one. It is based on the widespread thesis that 20th-century Euro-American society banished death from both public and private spheres. Secularization, individualization, medicalization, and objectification of death and related phenomena, according to some authors, ultimately led to a situation in Western culture in which death manifests itself primarily in hypertrophied form, for example in genre literature (or film). Thanatographies, which began to appear in greater numbers during the second half of the last century, but which continue to be a productive tradition, deal with death in its everyday form and complexity, and thus represent an important, albeit marginalized, counterexample to the no- tion that death was taboo in the 20th century. This study discusses how thanatographies inspired by related genres may be read, and proposes a new methodology for their interpretation, one that re- gards the literary text not as a work but as a play of mourning, and that shows different forms of the literary staging of grief on the thanatographic texts of Friederike Mayröcker.

Keywords

CS

thanatografie; pathografie; auto/biografie; práce truchlení; Friederike Mayröcker

EN

thanatography; pathography; auto/biography; work of mourning; Friederike Mayröcker

• Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts, Czech Republic
• Journal: Slovo a smysl - Word & Sense
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 21
• Issue: 45
• Pages: 119-138

Contributors

author

Musil Jan

• Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy, Ústav české literatury a komparatistiky