Corpse Encounters: An Aesthetics of Death

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This book takes a critical glance at the ways in which we attend to the corpse, tracing a trajectory from encounter toward considering options for disposal: veneered mortuary internment, green burial and its attendant rot, cremation and alkaline hydrolysis, donation and display, and ecological burial. Through tracing the possible futures of the dead that haunt the living, through both the stories that we tell and physical manifestations following the end of life, we expose the workings of aesthetics that shape corpses, as well as the ways in which corpses spill over, resisting aestheticization. This book creates a space for ritualized practices surrounding death: corpse disposal; corpse aesthetics that shape both practices attendant upon and representations of the corpse; and literary, figural, and cultural representations that deploy these practices to tell a story about dead bodiesabout their separation from the living, about their disposability, and ultimately about the living who survive the dead, if only for a while. There is an aesthetics of erasure persistently at work on the dead body. It must be quickly hidden from sight to shield us from the certain trauma of our own demise, or so the unspoken argument goes. Expertsscientists, forensic specialists, death-care professionals, and law enforcementare the only ones qualified to view the dead for any extended period of time. The rest of us, with only brief doses, inoculate ourselves from the materiality of death in complex and highly ritualized ceremonies. Beyond participating in the project of restoring our sense of finitude, we try to make sense of the untouchable, unviewable, haunting, and taboo presence of the corpse itself.

Reviews

At the end of William Blake's The Book of Thel, an otherworldly Thel runs in horror away from her own grave site and, ostensibly, her own corpse, choosing instead to return to a place free from the rot and experience of death. Unlike Thel, readers of Corpse Encounters will "face the face of death" and be transfixed. From material disintegration to ritual production, the dead body ultimately emerges in this work as an aesthetic locus for where meaning is (re)produced and readied for consumption by the living. Elam and Pielak have constructed an informed and candid symbology of corpses, a catalogue of what it means to "care for corpses" as they were rendered historically, as they confront us today (and will tomorrow), and as we struggle to make sense of themmake them acceptable, even containablethrough the literary. -- Janelle A. Schwartz, Hamilton College
There have been many books about deathfewer about the corpse, and none are as eloquent and provocative as Corpse Encounters. Elam and Pielak explore in clear and lyrical prose the aesthetic practices and rituals surrounding the dead body and its disposal. Corpse Encounters is a beautiful blend of creative nonfiction, theory, and literary criticism (it features Evelyn Waugh and Samuel Beckett) that will make you think hard about not only the body rendered in art but also the realness of bodies, our own and others, and about the ethics and the politics of what we do to those bodies when they inevitably encounter death. -- Dawn Keetley, Lehigh University
With theoretical underpinnings about death and the body, Jacqueline Elam and Chase Pielaks Corpse Encounters: An Aesthetics of Death intersects historical and modern conceptions of the disposal and display of the dead body. With a variety of compelling personal, visual, and literary examples, this fascinating book questions notions of materiality, preservation, and memorialization, and offers a unique examination of the political and artistic power of the corpse. -- Jolene Zigarovich, University of Northern Iowa

Author Bio

Jackie Elam teaches part-time at Scripps College and CalArts. Chase Pielak is lecturer of English at Auburn University.