Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies

ISBN-13: 9780748614776 / Angielski / Miękka / 2001 / 176 str.

Jeremy Tambling

Opis

Set against a backdrop of debates about the so-called 'end of history', 'the death of the subject' and 'the end of art', as well as the various forms of the 'post' that became prevalent in the late twentieth century, Jeremy Tambling introduces the idea of 'the posthumous' as a means of thinking about our relationship to the past, to death and to history.The trope of the posthumous is played out in a pattern of four deftly argued 'case-chapters' devoted to Shakespeare's Cymbeline (where the hero is Posthumus), Dickens's David Copperfield (a 'posthumous child'), Nietzsche's Ecce Homo (the record of a posthumous life) and Benjamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' (where history comes into being posthumously). Using these texts as a launching point Professor Tambling provides readings concerned with the question of why we should give attention to history, and to past texts, if there has been an irretrievable 'break' with history, and where history has turned into the heritage industry.Discussing