Writing Grief: Margaret Laurence and the Work of MourningUniv. of Manitoba Press, 24.09.2003 - 192 Seiten Margaret Laurence's much admired Manawaka fiction—The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House, and The Diviners—has achieved remarkable recognition for its compassionate portrayal of the attempt to find meaning and peace in ordinary life. In Writing Grief, Christian Riegel argues that the protagonists in these books achieve resolution through acts of mourning, placing this fiction within the larger tradition of writing that explores the nuances and strategies of mourning. Riegel's analysis alludes to sociological and literary antecedants of the study of mourning, including the tradition of elegy, from Derrida and Lacan to Freud, van Gennep, and Milton. The "work" of mourning is necessary to move from a state of emotional paralysis to one of acceptance and active engagement. Laurence's characters "perform the work of mourning ... returning over and over again to the key issues relating to loss," and, as Riegel's close examination of the texts suggests, are changed thereafter fundamentally and significantly. As an important study of one aspect of Laurence's oeuvre, Writing Grief not only illustrates how Laurence's own preoccupations with mourning are figured, but also how different ways of working through grief result in renewed potential for consolation and connection, and "a renewed definition of self." |
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... reinforces the significance of Laurence's young experiences of the devastation of death: My mother, lying in the grey-painted double bed, smiles at me. Her face is white and her dark hair is spread out across the white pillowcase. She ...
... reinforce liminal elements. The paradox presented in the opening line of The Diviners, for example, underscores the association of Morag Gunn to a liminal moment: "The river flowed both ways" (1 1). Elsewhere in the novel, when Morag is ...
... reinforces the necessity to labour at grief — to, in fact, labour against the paradoxes that define the liminal. The process of the labour of mourning asserts that being both this and that, to echo Turner, is not a tenable position ...
... reinforce her physical strength: she is the survivor, while the main figures she remembers died prematurely as a ... reinforces the difficulty with which Hagar will engage in the work of mourning. Further, the disgrace of crying ...
... an injured dog" (31). The simile reinforces her psychic sense of distance from her failing body's alien sounds, for she does not imagine herself as an old, dying woman, but as an animal. A short time later, Hagar 24 CHAPTER ONE.
Inhalt
3 | |
21 | |
Transgressing the Taboos Rachels Work of Mourning | 45 |
The Crisis of Word and Meaning The Work of Mourning and the Loss of Consolation | 69 |
Rest Beyond the River Mourning in A Bird in the House | 91 |
The Diviners and the Work of Mourning | 109 |
Laurence and the Elegiac Tradition | 139 |
ENDNOTES | 151 |
173 | |
185 | |