OMEGA—Journal of Death and Dying

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Book Review ! The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0030222819884466
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Teodorescu, A. (Ed.). (2019). Death Within the Text: Social, Philosophical

and Aesthetic Approaches to Literature. Newcastle upon Tyne, England:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 296 pp. $72.17 (hardbound). ISBN:
978-5275-2754-6.
Reviewed by: Sandra L. Bertman, Good Shepherd Community Care,
Newton, MA, USA

The logic of this compendium is based on three elements: literature, interdisci-

plinarity, and death. Traversing disciplines is a definite strength of its sociologist
editor, Adriana Teodorescu, who organized a conference on death in the liter-
ature as part of the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature
Association at Harvard University in 2016. Based on that 3-day seminar, the
15 chapters are authored by its participating international scholars: from
the United States (4), Romania (4), United Kingdom (2), France (2), Canada
(2), and Saudi Arabia (1).
The first section Knowing Death: Epistemological and Philosophical Aspects
emphasizes “the dimension of thanatic knowledge (emanating from death) and
correlates with the ontological and cognitive functions of literature” (p. 3).
The most readable chapter in this section for me is Rachel Warner’s
“The Poems and the Dances of the Shades: Destabilizing Psychological
Theories of Grief in The Year of Magical Thinking.” The key words of her
analysis of Joan Didion’s autobiographical account of grief are bereavement,
pathological grief, magical thinking, and pathography. Didion’s familiarity with
and resistance to psychological accounts of grief allows her to discard them and
be comforted by her own prose, finding meaning and understanding of grief in
alternate venues of literature, poetry, and arts. Two chapters scrutinize philos-
ophers’ works: Kierkegaard’s and Cioran’s perspective about agony in Chapter
4, and Sartre’s views on the contemporary tendency to overhumanize death in
Chapter 5. Two other chapters in this section, “Displacement of Memory: A
Negative Dialectics from Shoah to Alphville,” that is, the limits and (im)possi-
bility of bearing witness, and “The Duck, the Cat and the Rabbit: Looking at
Death in Picture Books for Young Children,” a look at death in picture books
2 OMEGA—Journal of Death and Dying 0(0)

for young children, would benefit from visual images supporting the texts. The
sculptural and installation art described in the former chapter and the way color
and what is included and what is left out in the illustrations, in the latter would
benefit greatly by this inclusion.
The second section, Socializing Death: Anthropological and Cultural
Dimensions, refers to the power of literary representations to tell stories—
social stories—about negotiating meanings and offering social configurations
when living (both as a society and as its constituent elements, namely, as indi-
viduals) at the horizon of an impending mortality, thus eliciting questions and
providing answers on the anthropological and cultural layers of society (p. 4).
Opening this section is a lovely chapter on the Irish ritual of keening, “To Keep
the Heart Beating . . . When It Really Wants to Break: Uses of Keening in Irish
Literature.” Another chapter, “Poetic Solutions for Environmental Pollution
Caused by Human Bodies Disposal” offers a comparative perspective between
the romantic vision of the body harmoniously reintegrated into nature and the
modern funeral industry’s practice of using toxic chemicals which are increas-
ingly contested in the current concern for an eco-friendly environment. Laura
Tradii’s chapter, “Death, the Anthropologist and Knowledge in Thomas
Mann’s The Magic Mountain” explores the protagonist Hans Castorp’s decon-
struction of dichotomies: body/mind, nature/civilization, instinct/reason, and
sacred/profane. The chapter on “The Curious Case of Sherlock Holmes’
Death” questions how the death of a fictional character can bring so much
grief to the “real” world. Conan Doyle’s idea of getting rid of Holmes so dis-
tressed his readers that the writer was forced to revive his detective. The final
chapter in this section, “The Protagonist Does Not Die Anymore: Examining
Narratives of Closure in the Popular Culture of Saudi Arabia,” emphasizes the
importance of one’s last moments as a strong indicator of future fate. Thus,
dying in a state of worship is a good ending; dying in sin, a bad one. This
chapter further inspects the evolution from the oral to the visual; that is, the
Islamic restrictions on depicting in pictures the decomposing body, the afterlife,
and tortures of the grave. I wish we had access to the video advertisement series,
“Aqim Salatak” (Arabic for establish prayer), which traces five generations of
commercial reenactments of actors before and in the afterlife, pressing viewers
to the urgency of saying their prayers. Alas, most of the YouTube links provided
in the references are removed or elsewise inaccessible.
The third section, Shaping Death: Aesthetic Dimensions, is dedicated to cin-
ematographic, and visual arts though “even in [these] articles that focus primar-
ily on non-literary representations, the literary perspective (hermeneutical
analysis, criticism) prevails” (p. 6). Author and Emeritus Professor of English,
Kevin Kopelson argues in “Fellini’s Death” that just about every film by direc-
tor Federico Fellini is about death and documents the way ghosts, tombs, grave-
yards, or doppelg€ angers are the symbolic evidence supporting this position.
Detailed analysis and other critics’ interpretations flesh out our understandings
Book Review 3

(and confusions) of Fellini’s complicated films. Kopelson concludes with his

personal confession that I must agree with, of being haunted by a feeling
“like the rather young Gelsomina still somewhat childish.” But isn’t this exactly
what films are supposed to do? To appeal to our senses? To make us—even
academicians—feel?
Florina Codreanu’s chapter, “The Dance of Death From Salome to Mata
Hari” depicts feminisms’ eroticism as a destructive weapon. Again, paintings
and still images of these figures to punctuate this scholar’s text would be wel-
comed. Tess Grousson’s article “Pierre Jean Jouve, A Grieving Poet” tracks the
French poet’s personal mourning experience, ultimately defining grief as “what
shatters the essence of the individual, the manner in which he inhabits the world,
and even the language which allows him to give an account of all this” (p. 244).
Vu Cong Minh’s “Death and Creation in Three Little Pigs” studies Walt
Disney’s cartoon (1933), and its parody, insisting on a sense of humor and
gags, The Blitz Wolf (1942), directed by Tex Avery. Told from a Second
World War anti-German perspective in Avery’s cartoon, the pigs go to war
against Adolf Wolf (Adolf Hitler). Despite the moralistic aspects of needing
to work hard to escape death, and the metaphoric use of animals to affirm
the radical difference between bestiality and humanity, Minh insists we must
consider their entertainment value. Whether or not we agree with the analyses
presented, thankfully, this chapter does include three images.
The final chapter of this section and of the book “Prolegomena to an
Aesthetics of Decay” by Marie-Pierre Krück, is an exploration of John
Donne’s last sermon, “Death’s Duel” (1961), which recalls the horror of putre-
faction of a body deserted by its soul. In Teodorescu’s own words in the intro-
duction, this chapter as well as the book uses

a variety of perspectives, from art, literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis to

medical science, in order to reveal what could be the aesthetic, ethical, and political
stakes of representing shapeless, abject, and rotten body and how transcendence
and ambivalence are always among its significant possibilities. (p. 6)

Despite its organization by sections: knowing death, socializing death, and

shaping death, I see no need to read the chapters in their designated order.
Having done so I’m motivated to reread at random or thematically those chap-
ters that deal with burial, corpse disposal, putrefaction, and decay as a group.
Similarly, I would reread the chapters dealing with personal grief trajectories
(Joan Didionand Pierre Jean Jouve), and those dealing with picture books and
cartoons separately.
I have continually used the author’s own words in this review since I person-
ally found the book not easy to read, as the language was rather esoteric and
ponderous. By using direct quotes I hope, on the other hand, that this book may
possibly emerge as a brilliant resource for scholars and academicians. Readers
4 OMEGA—Journal of Death and Dying 0(0)

of OMEGA are interdisciplinary professionals in nursing, psychology, social

work, psychiatry, medicine, chaplaincy, funeral service, and volunteers. If liter-
ature as defined by the Nobel Prize Russian author and literary translator Boris
Pasternak is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary
people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary (see https://
www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/boris-pasternak), I doubt clinicians or
bereavement therapists will find nuggets to share with their patients, clients,
or colleagues from this book. On the other hand, if what communication
guru Misha Glouberman (see https://www.jarofquotes.com/author.php?tag¼mi
sha%20glouberman) thinks of art which is that it is a “communication made in
the hope that interesting miscommunications will arise,” holds true, this book
would speak volumes to those linear intellectuals and researchers among us.

Editor’s Note
Sandra L. Bertman, PhD, FT, LCSW, is educational consultant of Thanatology,
Reflective Practice & Arts, Good Shepherd Community Care, Newton, MA, a scholar
of the Institute for Arts & Health, Lesley University (www.sandrabertman.com), and
author of Facing Death: Images, Insights & Interventions. Dr. Bertman explores the
healing power of arts and humanities in addressing challenging life-cycle events.