The spooky decorations of ghosts and skeletons will soon return to the doors of people before Halloween, but throughout the year, I am thinking of literary representations of death and dying.
I’m not alone. For centuries, death was an issue of fascination for both authors and readers. My own research focuses on death in Victorian era, a period of British literature that extends from 1837 to 1901, but what does the issue of death in general that attracts and repel?
When I had the opportunity to propose a course of special issues in literature in the fall of 2024, I knew that I wanted to create a course that tried to unravel why the issue of death is fascinating for people to write and read. Fortunately, my proposal was accepted and I am currently teaching a course called “Death, die and the Living Dead.”
What explores the course?
The theft of tombs, premature burial, murder, terror and pain are some of the issues explored through the study of poetry, stories and novels.
We analyze how the authors write about death, from the visceral horror of dying in the battle represented by Wilfred Owen in their 1920 poem, “Dulce et decorum est”, to the devastating intimacy of the loss in the 1928 poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay “Dirge Without Music”, and all the issues related to death in the middle.
Students also explore topics of madness, chaos and sudden death in short Gothic stories of the nineteenth and southern Gothic Gothic of the twentieth century. In these stories, death is often represented as an interruption, an unexpected event that occurs when the characters are busy doing other things.
It is useless to try to hide from death, a fact illustrated by Edgar Allan Poe in his 1842 story “The Red Death Mask.” In this story, Prince Prospero, the prince of an unnamed region, tries to evade “red death” abandoning his people and isolating himself and other nobles in a fortified abbey. But she finds them there: “And darkness and decay and red death had unlimited dominance,” as the story tells.
Death is inevitable, but it cannot always be anticipated. In the story of Flannery O’Connor of 1953 “A Good Man is Hard To Find”, an entire family is murdered by a fugitive criminal named The Misfit in the middle of a worldly road by road by road. As they are taken to the forest one by one for their execution, their disbelief reflects that of the reader: this really cannot happen, right?
Finally, we finished the semester with novels about the continuous body animation after death, including Mary Shelley’s novel of 1818, “Frankenstein”, and Bram Stoker’s novel of 1897, “Dracula”. This unit is particularly interesting for my students who specialize in forensic anthropology, that is, the recovery and examination of human remains. Some of these students spend time working on the “Bodies Farm” of the University of Tennessee, where they study donated human remains.
Students unite their understanding of the inevitable bodily decomposition with literature that imagines otherwise: bodies that do not break down or can be reused. Class conversations here range from how bodies are treated after death to the scientific advances of the nineteenth century and how the authors creatively imagine the possibility that a body can be resuscitated after death.
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Why is this course relevant now?
As Halloween reminds people annually, everyone will die someday. This knowledge, together with the literature that tries to navigate the unknown that is coming, encourages students to reflect on mortality, personal values, different perspectives and how they want to live. As the poet and novelist Dh Lawrence writes in his 1932 poem “The Death Ship”: “We are dying, we are dying, we are all dying / and nothing will stop the flood of death that rises within us.”
What is a critical lesson?
While an entire class dedicated to the literary representations of death may seem morbid, an focus on death and dying provides an excellent starting point for an exploration of what it means to be human, with all our concerns, hopes, desires and fears. Ultimately, this dark and premonitory class is energetic and affirms life.
What will students prepare the course?
This course prepares students to think critically about challenging issues, such as the literary representation of the death of a child or suicidal ideation. I facilitate the class, but the incisive reading and observation of the students drives the discussion. Students offer several interpretations and arguments informed by their own unique perspectives on loss, pain, memory and finite life expectancy.
The class also prepares students to address any literature assigned to them. Before each class session, students write down the designated text. They mark it with pen and pencils, or the digital equivalent, defining words, drawing on the margins, writing down metaphors and themes.
By practicing attentive reading and annotation in this way, students gain confidence to participate in a literary work and offer their own critical arguments in their written tasks.
*Molly Ryder Granatino is an assistant teaching professor at the English Department of the University of Tennessee.
This article was originally published in The Conversation
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