Elegy Flashcards
Ramazani: Contradictions in Elegy
Functions ‘both to mask and to reveal grief, to dramatize it and to disclose it’
The dead can be both ‘revered and resisted’
Ramazani: Apostrophe
‘apostrophe allows mourners to convert their relations to the dead from I-it to I-thou’
Apoostrophe: poet addressing absent person, abstract idea, or thing
Ramazani: self-destructive mourning
‘self-destructive mourning’ in tradition of elegy
Wayland - Reformation Elegy
‘Shaped by religious struggles over the death and dead’
E.g. replacement of Catholic funeral rites; removal of purgatory meaning less interaction between dead and living
Kennedy: recreation
An elegy is ‘a poem made out of other poems’; uses this ‘uniform’ to ‘convince us of seriousness and depth of meaning’
Uses this elevation tradition to ‘rise above’ - status gainer
Kennedy: WW2
Since the end of WW2, ‘national identity has become synonymous with remembrance’
‘Navigate between the public fiction and the private realities of loss’
Kennedy: association with subject
‘elegist’s heroic assertion of his own power…places in superior relation to his subject’
Kennedy: inability
‘protestations of inability..lack and the narration of lack…become a poetic resource, a means of asserting power and regaining control’
Lutz
Idea that mourning has a beginning and end/is a process makes ‘therapeutic sense’ in societies with de-ritualised mourning process; reflects need to expect an end to mourning
Austin
‘Performative utterances’ have led elegists to worry that through expressing reality they will change it [e.g. expressing desire to die]
Shaw
Suggests that inexpressible grief is a way to say that the poet cannot imagine his own death
Lacan
‘an elegy is structured like the unconscious’ - reflects process of grieving
Watkins
Elegy teaches us that it is impossible to represent absence; this is inherent in all forms of representation
Coleridge
‘elegy presents everything as lost and gone, or absent and future’
Shaw
Paradox of elegy - both need to remember and to forget the dead
