Death: An Intellectual History/Genealogy

This course tracks the changes in Western attitudes toward death and dying from the earliest Christian times to the present day. We begin with the commonality of death in from Graeco-Roman times through the period of the early church, a context in which individual lives mattered less than communal roles. We will then explore how the later medieval period evidences a new sense of individuality, and consequentially, an obsession with death as the destruction of the self (a concern that the church meets with new promises of immortality). The growing importance of family in the sixteenth century eventually shifts cultural attention from the death of the self to a preoccupation with the mourning of loved ones, an understanding that reaches its extreme in the nineteenth century, where grief is romanticized and death is sentimentalized as a staging post to eternal reunion. We will investigate specifically North American attitudes regarding death with an in depth examination of the Puritan way of death, and its gradual devolution into the contemporary American denial of death. Throughout, special attention will be paid to the development of different religious rituals for the sick, dying and dead, and how those rituals managed the cultural intersections of terror and belief particular to their times. The “texts” for the class (in addition to histories and rituals) will include iconographies of death as presented in church architecture, gravestones, art and film; and literary accounts, both secular and sacred. Limited Skype attendance allowed.
Syllabus for this course.