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"Despite all of their extravagant mortuary forms-chantry chapels, mortuary rolls, the daily observance of the Office of the Dead, Purgatory itself-people in medieval England were unable to talk about death. That is, their inability was not exactly religious, but more philosophical: strictly speaking, saying Caesar "is" dead is nonsense, since he no longer "is." This example may seem like a purely academic problem, but it shook the confidence of systems of meaning, reference, and knowledge for more than a thousand years. In "Arts of Dying," D. Vance Smith argues that literature fills the impossible space between two convictions: the faith that language reaches the dead; and the logic that denies that language ever could. As Smith puts it, literature can talk "about" something that is not-strictly speaking-logically possible, and the literature of death, he argues, is neither a prayer nor a proposition, but rather the dream of a possible impossibility. Indeed, the literature of "death" is really the literature of "dying": there is no "debate" between Body and Soul after death; there are only the crucial decisions one can make now, the works we leave behind, before the long process of dying reaches its end. Surveying the philosophical problem of dying in literature in English, Smith identifies three crucial "moments" over the course of 600 years. In the first moment (900- 1300), he compares the principal Body and Soul poems from the period; in the second moment (the fourteenth century), he identifies the emergent metaphor of the crypt, the place or monument of death; and, finally, in the fifteenth century (in the years after Chaucer), he finds the dominant metaphor of dying to be the archive, where the literature of dying is a search for adequate terms and styles or forms that might survive death. The book contributes to medieval and literary studies, and, secondarily, to the adjacent areas of phenomenology and continental philosophy"--
About the author
D. Vance Smith is professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of four books, most recently,
The Book of Incipit: Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century.
