Master class with Prof. Luisa Passerini: 'Memories of Death and Mourning'

This seminar will be based on presentations by Prof. Luisa Passerini, Marina Sozzi (University of Turin) and Tony Walter (University of Bath). It will consider the issue of narrations about death and mourning in relations to memory. In a secular perspective, memory has been often defined as the main or the only challenge to death. This claim has some elements of truth, but the relationship between memory and death is more complicate. In the realm of subjectivity, memory can replicate or reiterate death, or even anticipate it, projecting the subject in the future on the basis of remembering or fearing the death of others.

A range of attitudes towards evoking death and mourning will be explored, on the basis of: sociological inquiries; oral history testimonies; autobiographies; anthropological data; and literary texts.

Registration

Students should send a brief description of their research interests and motivations for their participation in the seminar. Read more [link naar nieuwsbericht Passerini] on how to register for this master class and on Luisa Passerini's visit at the Centre for the Humanities in September 2010.

Background readings

Neni Panourgia, Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity. An Athenian Anthropology. Madison-London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Peter Homans, ed., Simbolic Loss. The Ambiguity of Mourning and Memory at Century’s End. Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia, 2000.

Iona Heath, Matters of Life and Death. Key Writings. Oxford: Radcliff Medical Press, 2007.

John Berger, Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead. In Hold Everything Dear. London: Verso, 2007.

George A. Bonanno, The Other Side of Sadness. New York: Perseus Books Group, 2009.