Mourning

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

Lament in Greece has been historically linked to notions of cultural continuity and national belonging. As a literary genre or mode of performance, but also as a rhetorical trope, it has had a constitutive role in shaping national identity. Within this ideological context, Greek laments were strategically used by nineteenth-and early twentieth-century folklorists as survivals of an uninterrupted oral tradition, and hence as original proofs of continuity between modern Greeks and their supposed ancestors. Yet, the archives of oral poetry in general were extensively edited -but also partially constructed -by early folklorists in order to serve ideological purposes related to the construction of national identity, and to the promotion of the nation's image according to Western European notions of Hellenism. Furthermore, it was not unusual for these scholars to create themselves quasidemotic songs, in the manner and style of oral tradition. This was the case, for instance, of Georgios Tertsetis, whose quasi-demotic song 'The Fair Retribution' (H Δικαία Eκδίκησις) raises issues regarding desire between men, but also upon the impossibility of the subjects of such a desire to be mourned and lamented. Departing from an analysis of 'The Fair Retribution', and after offering a selective overview of the discourses of early folklorists regarding the use of Greek laments in the nationalist project, this article proceeds with a self-reflexive account of my lecture-performance Poustia kai Ololygmos: Selections from the Occult Songs of the Greek People. Enacting a pseudo-scientific persona, in this performance I announced the fictive discovery of an archive of Greek laments, which addresses issues of queer mourning and desire, while also bringing to the fore the absence of lament when it comes to queer subjectivities, in the past, but also in the present.

Here are the preliminary materials and first two chapters from my most recent book: Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience.

All chapters of the final published manuscript are freely available via MIT Press Direct:

https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5524/Grief-WorldsA-Study-of-Emotional-Experience

As you will see from other entries in this section, Oxford University Press and Palgrave/Springer now charge extortionate prices for books that I have published with them. (In all instances, I am happy to send you a PDF if you want to read them.)

In contrast, MIT Press made *Grief Worlds* freely available to all as a single PDF, without charging an open access fee. Hence, I am delighted to have published this book with them and would encourage others to consider doing the same.

The loss of the beloved, the fear or experience of it, either because of death or other reasons has been a repeatedly occurring theme in the work of Julian Barnes. In Before She Met Me, the fear of loss forms the subconscious of a humorous and meticulous examination of obsessive jealousy, in Talking It Over and Love etc., it is analysed through deception, revenge and resentment. Even behind the apparent postmodernist strategies and playful tone of Flaubert's Parrot, there resides the story of a retired, bereaving narrator who is trying to overcome the recent death of his once infidel wife. Irony and humour have always been the main traits of Barnes, no matter how serious the issues he represented. However, since the publication of The Sense of an Ending in 2011, Barnes's novels have grown to be more melancholic and lyrical in tone and less humorous and playful in style. Barnes's latest novels-The Sense of an Ending (2011), Levels of Life (2013), The Noise of Time (2016) and The Only Story (2018)-all develop around an aged protagonist or narrator whose story unfolds in an ironically self-aware lyrical tone, which detaches Barnes from postmodernism. The writing style of Julian Barnes, as a mature novelist, gets plainer as his mood becomes more sentimental and melancholic. This paper examines Barnes's representation of mourning and melancholy in Levels of Life where he dedicates the last section to his bereavement process after the loss of his wife, Pat Kavanagh, and The Only Story where he offers the piercing and grim love story of Susan (48) and Paul (19). The concepts of mourning and melancholy will be analysed by reference to Freud's and Derrida's views to illustrate how Barnes subtly probes them in the two novels as an artist.

This chapter examines Nan Goldin’s Cookie Portfolio, the well-known series of photographs of her good friend Cookie Mueller from the beginning of their relationship (1976) until Mueller’s death  (1989), in order to answer several questions about visuality, autobiography, marginality and death. I start by addressing the larger issue of how the representation of the AIDS crisis was transformed by the documentary endeavor of a photographer who was both subject and object of the gaze in an archival project constructed as a gesture of anticipated mourning. I also focus on the connections between photography, death and haunting which the Portfolio seems to invite, as well as on the larger dialogic potential contained within a visual narrative set in a small NYC underground community in the 80s, and which is undoubtedly both an autobiographical account (in the sense that by documenting Mueller, Goldin inevitably documents herself) and a memorial to a memorialist (Cookie herself wrote mostly autobiographical fictions, most of which are out of print now).

In this essay we will explore how contemporary models of grief and continuing bonds with the dead help us understand the emergence of new religious traditions. Our thesis is that what we have learned about grief and continuing bonds with the dead fills in a missing dimension in Max Weber’s description of the institutionalization of the founder’s charisma into a new religious tradition. After an introduction with a brief overview of Weber’s thesis and then a summary of contemporary models of grief, we will examine three cases, one contemporary and two well developed religious traditions. We begin on a small scale by examining the grief of American converts to Tibetan Buddhism and the continuing bonds they maintain with their dead teacher. Then we will move to the largest scale by looking how the disciples’ continuing bonds with Gautama and Jesus were institutionalized in the doctrine and rituals of Buddhism and Christianity.

This article examines Derrida’s insistence on the contretemps that breaks open time, paying particular attention to Politics of Friendship and the way in which this book envisages the ‘untimely’ as both interrupting, and making possible, friendship. Although I suggest that Derrida’s temporal deconstruction of the Aristotelian distinction between utility and ‘perfect’
friendships is convincing, I also argue that Derrida’s own account of friendship is itself touched by time, in the peculiar sense of ‘touched’ that connotes affected and wounded. Derrida’s work instantiates what Husserl might call a transcendental pathology, in that it intermittently instantiates an ethics of non-presentist time (the time which is also the transcendental
condition for the event of friendship), and, by contrast, disparages the significance of what we might call an ethics of phronesis, a ‘lived’ friendship of ‘omni-temporal’ dispositions, and embodied and habitual patterns. I end this article by proposing a dialectic between the disjunctive and conjunctive aspects of time that does not accord any kind of a priori privilege to the one over the other.

Background: Grief, as a universal human experience, follows certain stages as described in different (at times overlapping) models, by various researchers. However, the completion of certain emotional tasks and processes is required for grief to be resolved, allowing us to return to full living. The dynamics and expression of grief and mourning in the traumatic brain-injured patient present specific challenges for therapeutic intervention since the mourner may be impaired both cognitively and emotionally by the sequelae of their injury and is often unable to work-through their grief in a coherent and continuous process. In these cases, the therapist should take a very active role in the process, eliciting memories and emotions, and then integrating them together with the patient's associations and post-injury experiences, and grief reactions to the current loss. Moreover, when the loss occurs during, or after a rehabilitation program, the therapist's memories of anecdotes previously recounted by the patient may be elicited and offered by the therapist, and incorporated into the present treatment.

Do dreams take place in history? Or are they phenomena that take place outside history, on the margins of historical sense and truth? This paper has to do with dreams that take place in the space of the uncanny, where the familiar becomes menacing (according to Freud’s definition) and  from out of which memories of death and violence haunt the present. These dreams constitute a singular history, a spectral history or hauntology, whose logic does not obey the chronological development of historical time but the present’s indebtedness to justice and the remembrance of the dead. I develop this idea from fieldwork in Bojayá, Chocó, in 2016 and 2017, with Grupo de Cantadoras de Pogue [Group of female singers of Pogue], and the testimonies of Cira Pino, an alabadora to whom the art of singing was taught by the spirits who visit her in dreams. Alabaos are funerary songs that guide the deceased to the land of their ancestors. After the massacre of Bojayá, perpetrated by the FARC guerrillas in the town of Bellavista in May 2, 2002, alabaos have become songs of condemnation and resistance. This opens an unprecedented memory-work in Afro Colombian communities in Chocó through which they return to the place of the ancestors to find it transformed into an ominous space, inhabited not only by tradition and their ancestors, but also by the broken souls and bodies of those that have died untimely. I conclude by exploring the ethical dimension of this spectral history and its relationship to justice.

Il senso del segreto si compone di approfondimenti tematici su cinque filosofi che hanno indagato la questione del segreto e della segretezza, attraverso un confronto – spesso esplicito, talvolta latente – con l’opera di Marcel Proust. Da Walter Benjamin a Georges Bataille, da Maurice Blanchot a Jacques Derrida, passando per Gilles Deleuze, il volume mette in chiaro l’influenza che la Recherche ha esercitato sulla filosofia del Novecento, disegnando anche un affresco sul rapporto tra filosofia e letteratura, due discipline che indagano lo stesso ordine di questioni con voci e consistenze irriducibilmente diverse.

it’s the pregnant woman’s fault—exploiting culturally pervasive frames of anticipated guilt and intensive motherhood to put women on guard with ‘‘strident moral undertones’’ (p. 9). Many pushing pre-pregnancy care had and still have the best of intentions. Some reproductive justice advocates saw it as a viable policy strategy to increase health care resources for poor women generally; ‘‘an avenue for expanding women’s reproductive autonomy, not limiting it’’ (p. 171). The new frame would compel funding for additional health care. Health care providers also recognized it as an opportunity to bridge silos that maintained pregnancy care and pregnancy-prevention care as financially and politically distinct. Experts Waggoner interviewed did not intend to be reductionist, defining women as always ‘‘baby-making machines,’’ but rather pre-pregnancy care was posited as ‘‘the best idea they had to address the entrenched reproductive care silos and the political firestorm of reproductive health in America’’ (p. 173). Nonetheless, critics of the new framing see it as regressive and sexist. Throughout the book, Waggoner displays the flaws of and misgivings about the idea of the ‘‘zero trimester.’’ In addition to exposing temporal confusion and scientific inaccuracy within arguments for pre-conception care, she also critiques proponents for advocating individual-level solutions to deep structural health problems. Clinicians and the women they serve have not and are unlikely to be able to adequately address glaring racial disparities in maternal and child health with additional clinic visits. Furthermore, women of privilege and relative good health absorb the new health care resources more effectively than those who really need them. The pre-pregnancy rhetoric includes a heavy dose of ‘‘planning’’ language (See Chapter 5: ‘‘Get a Reproductive Life Plan!’’); however, the life-course planning frame has worked better for women with more resources and control over reproductive events. Waggoner challenges, ‘‘At issue is whether we are willing to focus our public-health interventions more squarely on reducing povertyor race-based disparities for at-risk women rather than pursue policies that ask all women of reproductive age to change their behavior and plan their pregnancies without the supports they might need to do so’’ (p. 19). As someone who straddles the worlds of study in this book—including sociology, public health, family planning, and medicine—I can appreciate the difficulty of this topic. Experts in this arena strive to improve women’s health by improving access to care. They also strive to guard women’s autonomy from those who seek to limit access to care (i.e., right-wing legislators, paternalistic clinicians, or oppressive sexual partners). Waggoner’s book succeeds in examining the social costs of this particular public health framing during a time when the jury is still out on whether the pre-conception care model is improving outcomes at all. She makes the critique with empathy for the space we occupy between a rock and a hard place. While it’s attractive among academics to shed a light on the dark side of public health efforts such as pre-conception health (i.e., surveillance, inequity, and futility), it is so much harder to figure out as a matter of policy and resource allocation what to do that is truly in women’s best interests. Waggoner walks this line with sensitivity and insight, making this book an important contribution to the literatures of science studies, risk politics, and reproduction.

Based on the research on continuing bonds (CB) with a deceased person to date, the reports of clinicians, and the contemporary theory of attachment, two dimensions of CB were distinguished: (i) a concrete CB, essentially characteristic of unresolved and prolonged grief, and (ii) a symbolic CB, specific to grief resolution. The psychometric properties of the Continuing Bonds Scale (CBS) were examined in a sample of persons from Poland (N = 244) bereaved after the death of a family member from 0.5 to 18 years before the survey (M = 3.45, SD = 2.25). In the first sub-sample (n = 141), the exploratory factor analysis revealed a two-factor structure of the CBS: the concrete and the symbolic dimension of the CB with the deceased. In the second sub-sample (n = 103), a good fit of this two-factor model of the CBS was determined by confirmatory factor analysis. At the bivariate analysis level, the concrete CB with the deceased positively correlated with attachment anxiety, and negatively with grief resolution and time since loss; the symbolic CB negatively correlated with attachment avoidance. When predicting grief resolution for two dimensions of CB (controlling for adult attachment, and sociodemographic and loss-related variables), concrete CB was a negative predictor, and symbolic CB was a positive predictor of the outcome variable. The reliability of the CBS subscales was acceptable. The CBS is a valid and reliable measure of two different CB dimensions. The model of concrete and symbolic CB with the deceased was discussed in the light of the current results and contemporary attachment theory.

ABSTRACT: This lecture, which forms part-1 of two parts, includes a discussion and illustration of the following topics: (1) How the Ancient Egyptians conceived of the tomb and its component parts; (2) How a typical middle-upper class family prepared their tomb; (3) What problems emerged regarding mortuary cults (e.g., continuity of offerings; security; etc.) and how they they resolved them (in part); (4) Ancient Egyptian beliefs about communicating with dead (including how they communicated); (5) Egyptian views upon reusing earlier tomb materials and actual practices (i.e., Did they still do it? Discourage it?); (6) Some of the Ancient Egyptian private (and royal) mortuary/funerary beliefs; (7) Some of the mummification practices during the Old Kingdom; (8) Old Kingdom (and later) Egyptians beliefs and approaches to death, mourning, and funerals; (9) Further discussion on private/elite afterlife beliefs (i.e., what happened after death?); (10) How the surviving family initiated and maintained a funerary cult for relatives; (11) Some of the ideal types of mortuary offerings (i.e., by the living …); (12) The various types of “back-up,” permanent offerings for the deceased; (13) Evidence for some historical autobiographical texts and other data (and their types); (14) Some doubts are sometimes implied (especially later) regarding the afterlife; and (15) The "typical" elite mastaba tomb layout/components (e.g., Burial; False door; Serdab). UPDATED: Extensive editing, formatting, and some additions on March 12, 2023.

Reticulated amid the lines of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is the collapse of traditional, classical culture, convoluted by the rise of consumer culture. Eliot’s fragmented poem which seeks to merge the past and present with the predicted future serves to prove that “the World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilization but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse” (Eliot). From the aforementioned poem and his various anthropological works, it can be reliably ascertained that Eliot regarded the crumbling of religion – the very foundation of culture – as the root cause of the cultural disintegration which he witnessed in the early 20th century and it is that which he mourns in The Waste Land.

This essay describes contemporary cultural practices related to death, dying and bereavement in Judaism, Mayan Indian and Christian traditions.  Twelve types of loss that a client might experience.  Three influential innovators of loss and grief theory: Bowlby, Kübler-Ross and Worden.  The four tasks of grieving by Worden.  Three complicated grief reactions: delayed grief, masked grief and chronic grief.  And the importance of rituals and experiential activities in response to loss.

En este artículo se hace una indagación por las relaciones entre violencia, arte y prácticas simbólicas. Para tal fin, se reflexiona sobre la persistencia del cementerio, las tumbas, los féretros y sus metáforas, tanto en el arte contemporáneo como en los movimientos de familias que buscan a sus desaparecidos. Inseparable de esta persistencia es la imagen de las personas asesinadas y desaparecidas: ¿cómo enmarcar estos retratos? ¿Cómo dignificar tanto la imagen de estas personas como los ritos funerarios? Los objetos, como los féretros, no son solo objetos, así como las imágenes de personas desaparecidas, no son solo retratos: son imágenes y objetos cuyas circunstancias las arrancan del flujo cotidiano de los acontecimientos y no es un azar, por lo tanto, que algunas prácticas artísticas busquen dignificarlas intentando saldar las deudas simbólicas con las personas asesinadas y desaparecidas, así como con sus familias.

This essay is on the aesthetic sociality of black life as presented in the film Moonlight.

I theorize the momentariness of intimacy as opening up a space of affective relations that circulate around loss and blackness, distinct from prevailing conceptualizations of mourning and melancholia. This is about a film and the principal character in that film (Chiron), that do not fit easily into established categories, and are not so easily inscribed within psychological profiles, performative selves, repudiating egos or sociological identities.

Counter to Munoz's positing that the occlusion of temporal and affective investments in futurity and hope is “the gay white man’s last stand,” I argue that such non-developmental movements can be keyed to the racial, yet precisely to the extent that the racial is not defined in terms of identity, but instead would retain that which is more singular: not the nominal, but the adjectival. In which, following Barthes, the adjectival configures the moment (kairos), here on the scale of the eco-aesthetic (e.g. “moonlight”) and its colours (e.g. “blue” as in the central words of the film: “in the moonlight, black boys are blue”).

This is similar to what Candace Vogler argued at the end of her essay, "Sex and Talk," when she wrote: “By cultivating not just the pleasures of self-expression, self-abolition, or self-disavowal [i.e. self-repudiation as in melancholy], a space might open up for a reading of a larger world writ into an intimate scene, and perhaps, from there, for imagining a kind of intimate engagement with a larger world as something neither hostile to nor affirming of one’s own most sense of self” (365).

I believe this space is where the (non-psychological, non-sociological) aesthetic imagination lies, and toward which it is directed. I argue that its time is the temporality of the moment, and its linguistic tense is the adjective: a description of a pre-linguistic cosmic-ascetic corporeality and retreat—something like Chiron's "sovereignty of quiet" (Quasha).

Reflecting on the role that writing played in the recovery, the author describes the mourning process after loss of her husband during the Virginia Tech massacre on April 16, 2007. She analysis how her traumatization was intensified by the interaction with the public. The private and tranquil space of her home is portrait as the center of mourning and healing. Through writing she regained emotional control in and over literary and figurative spaces of traumatization which enabled her gradual reintegration into the public life.

Rizpah, Daughter of Aiah:
Concubine and Mother, Silent and Brave
Yael Shemsh, Bar-Ilan University

In 2 Samuel 3:6–11, Rizpah is presented as an object, a tool in the power struggles between men. Her voice is not heard and she never actually makes an appearance; she is only part of the back story. Neither Ish-bosheth nor Abner evinces any respect for her. In 2 Samuel 21:1–14, her status is quite different. Here too she is mute, but her heroic defense of the corpses of her sons and of the other executed Saulides, in conditions of extreme physical and emotional distress for her, speaks for itself. She works a strong impression both on readers and on the other characters in the story—the anonymous informant who tells David about her vigil and David himself. Rizpah’s efforts on behalf of the corpses of the executed men inspire David to make his own generous gesture and show respect to the bodies and memories of Saul and his descendants.
Rizpah’s silence is even more conspicuous if we compare her to other female characters who speak at length to explain the motives for their actions (notably Sophocles’ Antigone) or to achieve their goal (Abigail and the wise woman from Tekoa—who, like Rizpah, influence David). Her devotion to the House of Saul is emphasized by the analogy between her and the men of Jabesh Gilead, who also act heroically to rescue the corpses of Saul and his sons (1 Sam. 31:11–13). Her devotion to her sons is a source of inspiration and merits her a place of honor in the gallery of biblical mothers who exerted themselves on behalf of their sons, even though her action came after their deaths.

This is the keynote address given to the Tennessee Association of Pastoral Therapists, an organization of pastoral psychotherapists, on August 14, 2009, in Nashville, TN, USA. It is a reflection by the author upon the continued developments of his thoughts subsequent to the publication of his article "Recovering Grief in the Age of Grief Recovery,” The Journal of Pastoral Theology, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring 2003.

En el presente trabajo se lleva a cabo un análisis de uno de los textos más influyentes de la literatura mexicana reciente, Antígona González (2012) de Sara Uribe. En un primer momento, se expone el contexto social, político y estético en el que la pieza de Uribe fue escrita, para después proceder a estudiar las estrategias textuales de que se sirve Uribe para generar una autoría colectiva, con especial atención a las aportaciones teóricas llevadas a cabo por Cristina Rivera Garza y su concepto de “desapropiación”. Por último, el artículo propone una interpretación de la obra tanto en sus aspectos formales como en su aspecto ético-político, desarrollando su vínculo con las propuestas de Judith Butler. El presente trabajo relaciona ambas dimensiones, al ubicar la obra en una tradición de escritura militante cuyo objetivo es llevar a cabo el duelo por los desaparecidos en la frontera norte de México.

Traduction 2004 révisée:

Jacques Aubert (Télémaque), Pascal Bataillard (Protée, Lotophages, Eumée), Michel Cusin (Nestor), Sylvie Doizelet (Charybde et Scylla), Patrick Drevet (Hadès, Nausicaa), Bernard Hoepffner (Eole, Circé, Ithaque), Thiphaine Samoyault (Les Sirènes, Les Lestrygons, Le Cyclope, Pénélope), Marie-Danièle Vors (Calypso)

La traduction des Boeufs du Soleil par Auguste Morel (suivant la formule consacrée au moment de cette première traduction en 1929: avec Stuart Gilbert et Valéry Larbaud, traduction revue par l'auteur) a été conservée avec des révisions.

Appareil critique:

Jaques Aubert (Télémaque, Eole, Les Boeufs du Soleil, Circé, Ithaque), Pascal Bataillard et Michel Cusin (Nestor, Hadès, Nausicaa), Daniel Ferrer (Les Sirènes), Jean-Michel Rabaté (Charybde et Scylla, Pénélope), André Topia (Protée, Les Lotophages, Le Cyclope) et Marie-Danièle Vors (Calypso, Les Lestrygons, Les Rochers errants, Eumée)

In Memoires for Paul de Man Derrida articulates a new model of mourning as an ongoing conversation with the dead who are both within us and beyond us and continue to look at us with a look that is a call to responsibility and transformation. Derridean mourning significantly revises classic psychoanalytic accounts of mourning, reworking and combining conceptual apparatus from psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature: incorporation (Abraham and Torok), gedachtnis (Hegel), rhetoricity and aporia (de Man).

Dans ce livre, le deuil, présenté couramment comme un repli sur soi et un chemin de solitude, est conçu dans les termes d'une action. Ceux qui restent met l'accent sur le rapport aux normes qui s'établit et se construit dans le deuil, du point de vue des endeuillés. Partir des individus ayant perdu un proche signifie considérer que chacun agit à l'épreuve des tensions qu'il éprouve et qui sont induites par le deuil, des incertitudes, des conflits que cette situation génère et des ajustements qu'elle demande. Fondé sur des témoignages, cet ouvrage nous fait entrer dans leur expérience du deuil. Non, le deuil ne se réduit ni aux rites funéraires, ni à la psychologie. Le deuil s'inscrit dans des actions, des interactions, des croyances et des comportements, qui sont situés et cadrés socialement.

This article draws on Robert Solomon's distinction between grief and mourning to examine the old question of whether Stoicism's approach to the emotions is wholly 'unsympathetic'.  It argues that, if mourning, including public commemoration and sharing of memories, is taken to be the best means to work through grief, and come to terms in time with loss, then Seneca's Consolatio ad Marciam is clearly "pro-mourning".  Marcia's grief is preventing others from even mentioning Drusus around her, after three years, and Seneca wishes to redress this failure to mourn, which can do honor to her love for her son.

From its invention onwards photography attributed with the ability to reveal the invisible and miraculous. During the nineteenth century Spiritualists used the medium in order to communicate the deceased, and these photographs were unique souvenirs for its owners. Although spirit photographs were used during the mourning process, these surrogate objects shall be considered as melancholy objects as they signify the resistance to mourn. This paper focuses on the definition of melancholy and discusses the spirit photograph of Mabel Warren in this realm. The photograph functions here, as a tool for meditation, persisting the desire of what is lost.  Photography's relationship with miraculous beings still exists today within religious activities and the materialization of the invisible is needed to embrace what is desired, and through emotional investment, the need for belief may be fulfilled.

We will die one day, sooner or later. Traditionally, we approach death from a stoic perspective (Gawande, 2014, p.170). Dead bodies are covered up and quickly whisked away as if there is a shameful connotation affiliated with viewing them. The bereaved, who hide their grief to the point that no one would guess anything had happened, receive social praise. Philippe Ariès delivered a series of lectures at Johns Hopkins in 1973. He pointed out that at the start of the 1930s, there had been a cultural shift regarding how Western societies viewed death. “Death,” he wrote, “would become shameful and forbidden.” (Didion, 2006, p.45) We can attribute this dismissal of grieving in public based on contemporary trends. This epicurean philosophy dictates that we must enjoy ourselves conscientiously, without disturbing others amidst their similarly hedonistic world. Mourning without shame is perceived as disgraceful and self-indulgent. (Didion, 2006, p.45)

This particular work sets out to analyse horror’s relation to grief due to the genre’s proximity to death and secondly, to propose a new theory that establishes the 21st-century horror films to be directly about the process of mourning. The dissertation utilises the case study design, examining some of the most prominent horror films of the century: Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019), Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018), Pet Sematary (Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, 2019), The Woman in Black (James Watkins, 2012) and The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014). These films are studied closely using the tools of genre theory and grief studies and the research is structured according to Kübler-Ross’s “five stages of grief”. Looking at these horror films’ narrative and visual approach to grief with fresh eyes, building on the works of grief scholars, and redefining the genre studies’ perspective to the horror being more about the fear, this research highlights the horror genre as a cinematic tool for representing the emotional and mental outcomes of death.