4th Global Conference
Wednesday 12th July - Friday 14th July 2006
Mansfield College, Oxford
Session 5A: Death in Arts
Chair: Ken Worpole
John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat: An Exploration of Death and
Dying in an Enduring Children's Picture Book
Phil
Fitzsimmons
Faculty of Education, The University of Woollongong,
Australia
This paper details how Brooks and Wagner’s (1978) best
selling children’s picture book John Brown, Rose and the Midnight
Cat, explores the onset of death, coping with death and the relationship
between family members and those who are about to die. Although this
text was the Australian picture book of the year in 1978 and has continued
to be a children’s favourite for almost three decades, academics,
parents or ‘book-houses’ have not grasped the allegorical
nature of this text. Even the most cursory glance at comments made by
publisher’s and book seller’s websites reveals just how widely
misinterpreted and misunderstood this text continues to be The Dymocks’ (2005)
website, one of Australia’s leading booksellers, states that this
book is about “about the possessiveness of love”. Healthy
Books (2005) is a little more forthright describing the book as ‘a
strange little fable, but quite beautiful in both words and pictures.’ Indeed
on the surface this book is a very ‘strange little tale’.
However, a ‘text analyst’ overlay (Harris, Turbill, Fitzsimmons
and McKenzie 2005) using binary opposites in tandem with archetypal analysis
reveals the polyvalent nature of this narrative. These methodological facets
allow an easy morph into a deeper subtext where the concept of death becomes
a para-textual sliding signifier revealing the current First World’s fear
of death and dying.
'Of Death I try to think like this' (J. 1558):
Emily Dickinson's 'Play' with Death
Lucia
Aiello
Department of Literature and the Humanities,
John Cabot University,
Rome,
Italy
This paper explains and develops Emily Dickinson’s use of the
word and the concept of ‘Death’. The paper argues that in
her poetry Dickinson divests death of traditional metaphysical connotations
and turns it into a mere word or signifier shedding light on the composite
nature of human experience. As such, within the poetry the concept of
death undergoes a process of ‘kenosis’ or is divested of
its intimidating power, without however falling into the cliché of
becoming replete with ‘positive’ meaning. The paper contends
that ‘Death’ in Dickinson is a figure of the poetic form
that, together with other figures such as ‘Life’, ‘Poet’, ‘I’, ‘Immortality’, ‘Grief’,
etc., assumes a conceptual dignity beyond the role allocated to it by
traditional semantic definitions. New combinations become workable, innovative
associations emerge as a result of the expansion of perception and prefigure
possibilities of new meanings. The paper explores some of these possibilities
using Dickinson’s poems as examples.
The paper concludes by advancing the hypothesis that Dickinson’s ‘ironic’ and
playful engagement with death at the level of the conceptual covers in fact a
much deeper ontological need, namely the need to ‘distil sense’,
making sense, not of death, but of human experience as a whole, in its contradictory
forms. The ontological terror ensues every time the question is posed whether
there is meaning or not. The paper argues that a fear of a loss of sense, which
some have associated with Dickinson’s mental instability, is an anxiety
concerned with the ineffable, the unspeakable, and therefore the meaningless:
As Dickinson puts it: ‘When Terror were it told/In any Tone commensurate/Would
strike us instant Dead’ (J. 1323).
The Living Dead as Cinematic Images of Death
Outi
Hakola
Department of
Media Studies, University of Turku,
Finland
We do not have certain knowledge of death as an experience.
Therefore it is an open area for beliefs and fictions. The cinematic
living dead, like vampires, mummies and zombies, represent death in a
very concrete way. The living dead are familiar from the horror genre.
They create a threat to the humanity because their physical and mental
transformation while they cross the limits of death.
The living dead bring
up the questions of corpse and transgression of the limits of death.
The living dead are uncanny Other. In horror theory this otherness is
often been studied with Julia Kristeva’s conception
of abject. The abjectly threat is concretized in the physical appearance
of these creatures. The living dead bring forward the fear of death and
dying.
A living person has a soul that makes he/she a human, but the
living dead is merely a physical corpse without humanity. In the transformation
process the soul is lost and this makes the living dead inhuman and monstrous.
Even though transformation changes humans one thing remains. The living
dead retains the physical body. Through transformation process the otherness
is implicated to the outer appearance of these monsters.
The threat of
the living dead is both mental and physical. The living dead live to
fulfil their drives and instincts. They threat the idea of communities,
social behaviour and morality. Physically they threat the existence of
the living. They can kill you or transform you into one of them. The
living dead create more death.
While representing death in the horror
films, the living dead highlight the fear that we have for unknown and
death. In my presentation I will consider, how death is presented in
the Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis
Ford Coppola/1992).
Representations of Death and Dying
in Post-Soviet Russian and Baltic Cinemas
Irina
Novikova
Department of Culture and Literature, University of Latvia,
Riga, Latvia
My paper will focus on how death, suicide and dying
were have been represented in the post-Soviet Russian, Lithuanian, Estonian,
Latvian films produced in the period of the 1990s.
How did
the films (Russian ‘necrorealism’, Chukhrai, Bodrov,
Bartas, Keedus and other directors whose films will be discussed in the
presentation) bring to bear on the "real" represented by the
dead and/or dying body? How did filmmakers negotiate it in their representations
of death, dying, suicide, elements of gothic? Further on, how did the filmmakers
in the collapse-transition period of the 1990s approach the representation
of death, and to what ends? What genres were (re)claimed in the ‘necrostate’ discourse,
and in which ways they were related to the ‘real’ of collective
re-imagining nations, pasts, borders, and boundaries of postcolonial ‘rebirth’?
I
will examine particular instances of "filmed death" from Russian,
Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian cinematic settings in the postcolonial context,
by using Edward Said’ contrapunctal methodology of analysis.
I will
also address the gendering and racing of representations
of death and dying as previously-taboo images and themes as an insistent
discursive and emotional agenda of ‘post-Soviet-Hamlets’.
© Inter-Disciplinary.Net 2006