Browsing by Subject "Loss (Psychology) in literature"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    I miss you the most when you're here: The Chronotope of Fantastic Mourning in American Gods
    (2019) Knecht, Miles; McGrane, Laura
    Each text has a unique depiction of time and space, a particular way it leads its readers through narrative reality. This sensation of movement through time and space — referred to as a text’s chronotope — is often a product of genre conventions, and different genres tend to have radically different chronotopes. In reading Neil Gaiman’s 2001 novel American Gods, one experiences a sensation of temporality that both draws upon the conventions of the fantasy genre(s), and is also created within the very refutation of these conventions and expectations. I argue that the sense of temporality in American Gods gives both reader and protagonist new ways to view loss and the experience of mourning by simultaneously reifying and rejecting conclusion itself. By incorporating different genres and conventions into its narrative, and then turning away from each genre’s expected conclusion at every turn, the novel gives the reader a sense of continuance even within its many moments of conclusion and ending. This utilization of different genre rhetorics, as well as the text’s treatment of death, loss, and inter-temporal conflict, creates a sense of chronotope that highlights the interchangeability of life and death, past and present, believer and believed-in. This chronotope is both uniquely fantastic, and uniquely tuned to the experience of mourning.
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    Loss, Interruption, and Melancholia in Miltonic Lyric
    (2006) Lerner, Ross; Benston, Kimberly W.
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    The Language Stump: Language and Loss in Maggie Nelson's Bluets
    (2019) Gandolfo-Lucia, Christopher; McGrane, Laura
    This essay explores how loss is structured by the lyrical, linguistic patterns and citational cadence of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. The text is constructed out of over two hundred fragments and loosely narrates the aftermath of a heartbreak, vacillating between what is rendered impossible in the wake of heartbreak and what is made available. The study foregrounds the way annotations become residues of lost readings, allowing readers to revisit the site of loss (both linguistically and physically) in much the same way Nelson revisits loss through citation and reiteration. This mode of investigation instantiates a paradigm in which both Nelson and the reader are structured simultaneously as producer and consumer: Nelson is figured as author of Bluets and audience to the texts she cites, while the reader is consumer of Bluets and producer of their annotations. Such an approach makes clear how annotative practices are also citational ones and how Bluets is a text which invites its reader to revisit it as a means of accessing the self through what of their reading has changed and what remains. Important theoretical texts for this study are Stanley Fish’s “How to do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary Analysis,” Jonathan Culler’s “Theory of the Lyric,” Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, and Sam Anderson’s “What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text.”
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