Dying Modern
A Meditation on Elegy
Diana Fuss (Author)
9780822353751
Hardback, published 12 April 2013
160 pages
22.1 x 14.5 x 1.8 cm, 0.313 kg
“[Fuss] approaches variations on the form of elegy with such complexity and acumen, and provides much insight into the complexities of our relation to death and the enigma of our simultaneous proximity and avoidance. These are things, after all, about which it can be almost impossible to talk.”
- Diana Arterian (Los Angeles Review of Books) “[An] elegant meditation. . . . Even Fuss admits that she is surprised that ‘her little book on elegy . . . [which] I thought was about dyig quietly evolved into a book about surviving. It is a pleasure to be surprised alongside her.”
- Sally Connolly (TLS) “This book is an erudite, beautifully written study of them. If you’re a lover of Emily Dickinson’s work or that of Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, or Richard Wilbur, you will want to read this book. If you teach literary criticism or simply love poetry, you will want to read Fuss’s book. Superb book.”
- Hope Leman (Critical Margins) “In a luminous, beautifully considered study of the modern elegy, Fuss (Princeton) demonstrates the ways that poets have creatively imagined modes of talking about the dead...Highly recommended.”
- D. A. Henningfeld (Choice) “[Fuss] argues persuasively for the continued value of the consolatory elegy and examines “the ethical dimentions of the modern elegy.”... [A] concise, insightful, meditative book.”
- Barbara Kelly (Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin) "An exceptionally lively, often glitteringly witty essay on the vagaries, contents, and discontents of nineteenth- and twentieth-century elegy, a genre
whose fate, in England and America, has been radically disrupted and even, sometimes, deformed by the cultural fate of modern death itself."
- Sandra Gilbert (Literature and Medicine)
In
Dying Modern, one of our foremost literary critics inspires new ways to read, write, and talk about poetry. Diana Fuss does so by identifying three distinct but largely unrecognized voices within the well-studied genre of the elegy: the dying voice, the reviving voice, and the surviving voice. Through her deft readings of modern poetry, Fuss unveils the dramatic within the elegiac: the dying diva who relishes a great deathbed scene, the speaking corpse who fancies a good haunting, and the departing lover who delights in a dramatic exit.
Focusing primarily on American and British poetry written during the past two centuries, Fuss maintains that poetry can still offer genuine ethical compensation, even for the deep wounds and shocking banalities of modern death. As dying, loss, and grief become ever more thoroughly obscured from public view, the dead start chattering away in verse. Through bold, original interpretations of little-known works, as well as canonical poems by writers such as Emily Dickinson, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wright, and Sylvia Plath, Fuss explores modern poetry's fascination with pre- and postmortem speech, pondering the literary desire to make death speak in the face of its cultural silencing.
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Dying . . . Words 9
poetry 10
consolation 12
defiance 20
banality 24
newness 31
lastness 35
2. Reviving . . . Corpses 44
comic 46
religious 50
political 57
historical 61
literary 67
poetic 73
3. Surviving . . . Lovers 78
loving 82
waiting 86
leaving 90
refusing 95
existing 98
surviving 102
Conclusion 107
Notes 113
Bibliography 131
Index 141
Copyright Acknowledgments 149
