Celebrate Día de Muertos with Norris Medical Library! Below are books on display at the library on the Plaza level. The titles featured in this list encapsulate the idea of death positivity and celebrating traditional grief and death rituals.
The Art of Death by
A moving reflection on a subject that touches us all, by the bestselling author ofClaire of the Sea Light Edwidge Danticat'sThe Art of Death: Writing the Final Storyis at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work. "Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses," Danticat notes in her introduction. "I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing." The book moves outward from the shock of her mother's diagnosis and sifts through Danticat's writing life and personal history, allthe while shifting fluidly from examples that range from Gabriel García Márquez'sOne Hundred Years of Solitudeto Toni Morrison'sSula.The narrative, which continually circles the many incarnations of death from individual to large-scale catastrophes, culminates in a beautiful, heartrending prayer in the voice of Danticat's mother. A moving tribute and a work of astute criticism,The Art of Deathis a book that will profoundly alter all who encounter it.
ISBN: 9781555977771Publication Date: 2017-07-11
Buddhist Funeral Cultures of Southeast Asia and China by
The centrality of death rituals has rarely been documented in anthropologically informed studies of Buddhism. Bringing together a range of perspectives including ethnographic, textual, historical and theoretically informed accounts, this edited volume presents the diversity of the Buddhist funeral cultures of mainland Southeast Asia and China. While the contributions show that the ideas and ritual practices related to death are continuously transformed in local contexts through political and social changes, they also highlight the continuities of funeral cultures. The studies are based on long-term fieldwork and covering material from Theravāda Buddhism in Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and various regions of Chinese Buddhism, both on the mainland and in the Southeast Asian diasporas. Topics such as bad death, the feeding of ghosts, pollution through death, and the ritual regeneration of life show how Buddhist cultures deal with death as a universal phenomenon of human culture.
ISBN: 1139376896Publication Date: 2012-04-26
Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? by
#1 New York Times Bestseller 2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST In her first memoir, New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents. When it came to her elderly mother and father, Roz held to the practices of denial, avoidance, and distraction. But when Elizabeth Chast climbed a ladder to locate an old souvenir from the "crazy closet"--with predictable results--the tools that had served Roz well through her parents' seventies, eighties, and into their early nineties could no longer be deployed. While the particulars are Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies--an anxious father who had relied heavily on his wife for stability as he slipped into dementia and a former assistant principal mother whose overbearing personality had sidelined Roz for decades--the themes are universal: adult children accepting a parental role; aging and unstable parents leaving a family home for an institution; dealing with uncomfortable physical intimacies; managing logistics; and hiring strangers to provide the most personal care. An amazing portrait of two lives at their end and an only child coping as best she can, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant will show the full range of Roz Chast's talent as cartoonist and storyteller.
ISBN: 9781608198061Publication Date: 2014-05-06
Chinese American Death Rituals by
Death is a topic that has fascinated people for centuries. In the English-speaking world, eulogies in poetic form could be traced back to the 1640s, but gained prominence with the "graveyard school" of poets in the eighteenth century often stressing the finality of death. Chinese American Death Rituals examines Chinese American funerary rituals and cemeteries from the late nineteenth century until the present in order to understand the importance of Chinese funerary rites and their transformation through time. The authors in this volume discuss the meaning of funerary rituals and their normative dimension and the social practices that have been influenced by tradition. Shaped by individual beliefs, customs, religion, and environment, Chinese Americans have resolved the tensions between assimilation into the mainstream culture and their strong Chinese heritage in a variety of ways. This volume expertly describes and analyzes Chinese American cultural retention and transformation in rituals after death.
ISBN: 0759107335Publication Date: 2005-09-15
Communities of Death by
To 21st century readers, 19th century depictions of death look macabre if not maudlin--the mourning portraits and quilts, the postmortem daguerreotypes, and the memorial jewelry now hopelessly, if not morbidly, distressing. Yet this sentimental culture of mourning and memorializing provided opportunities to the bereaved to assert deeply held beliefs, forge social connections, and advocate for social and political change. This culture also permeated the literature of the day, especially the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman. In Communities of Death, Adam C. Bradford explores the ways in which the ideas, rituals, and practices of mourning were central to the work of both authors. While both Poe and Whitman were heavily influenced by the mourning culture of their time, their use of it differed. Poe focused on the tendency of mourners to cling to anything that could remind them of their lost loved ones; Whitman focused not on the mourner but on the soul's immortality, positing an inevitable reunion. Yet Whitman repeatedly testified that Poe's Gothic and macabre literature played a central role in spurring him to produce the transcendent Leaves of Grass. By unveiling a heretofore marginalized literary relationship between Poe and Whitman, Bradford rewrites our understanding of these authors and suggests a more intimate relationship among sentimentalism, romanticism, and transcendentalism than has previously been recognized. Bradford's insights into the culture and lives of Poe and Whitman will change readers' understanding of both literary icons.
ISBN: 9780826220196Publication Date: 2014-12-18
Coping with the Final Tragedy by
This book as a whole emphasizes common concerns shared by all humanity while the volume chapters emphasize various cultural diversities, and the remarkable varieties in the ways that people understood and experience death and grief. The articles in this new text demonstrate these differences and provide insight into human resourcefulness and ingenuity as people cope with death, the final tragedy.
ISBN: 0895030829Publication Date: 1991-06-15
Dangerous Voices by
In Dangerous Voices Holst-Warhaft investigates the power and meaning of the ancient lament, especially women's mourning of the dead, and sets out to discover why legislation was introduced to curb these laments in antiquity. An investigation of laments ranging from New Guinea to Greece suggests that this essentially female art form gave women considerable power over the rituals of death. The threat they posed to the Greek state caused them to be appropriated by male writers including the tragedians. Holst-Warhaft argues that the loss of the traditional lament in Greece and other countries not only deprives women of their traditional control over the rituals of death but leaves all mourners impoverished.
ISBN: 9780203041017Publication Date: 2002-09-11
Day of the Dead in the USA by
Honoring relatives by tending graves, building altars, and cooking festive meals has been an honored tradition among Latin Americans for centuries. The tribute, "el Dia de los Muertos," has enjoyed renewed popularity since the 1970s when Latino activists and artists in the United States began expanding "Day of the Dead" north of the border with celebrations of performance art, Aztec danza, art exhibits, and other public expressions. Focusing on the power of ritual to serve as a communication medium, Regina M. Marchi combines a mix of ethnography, historical research, oral history, and critical cultural analysis to explore the manifold and unexpected transformations that occur when the tradition is embraced by the mainstream. A testament to the complex nature of ethnic identity, Day of the Dead in the USA provides insight into the power of ritual to create community, transmit oppositional messages, and advance educational, political, and economic goals.
ISBN: 0813548578Publication Date: 2009-06-09
Days of Death, Days of Life by
Kristin Norget explores the practice and meanings of death rituals in poor urban neighborhoods on the outskirts of the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Oaxaca City, Norget provides vivid descriptions of the Day of the Dead and other popular religious practices. She analyzes how the rites and beliefs associated with death shape and reflect poor Oaxacans' values and social identity. Norget also considers the intimate relationship that is perceived to exist between the living and the dead in Oaxacan popular culture. She argues that popular death rituals, which lie largely outside the sanctioned practices of the Catholic Church, establish and reinforce an ethical view of the world in which the dead remain with the living and in which the poor (as opposed to the privileged classes) do right by one another and their dead. For poor Oaxacans, these rituals affirm a set of social beliefs and practices, based on fairness, egalitarianism, and inclusiveness.
ISBN: 0231136897Publication Date: 2005-12-13
Dead Lovers by
From Eurydice to Laura and beyond, dead lovers call forth powerful expressions of grief, sorrow, love, and longing. They occasion mourning and other rituals and seem to be intrinsically bound up with changing ideas of subjecthood itself. Dead Lovers explores the complex attachments to the figure of the dead lover in Western literature, art, and other forms of cultural expression from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. By reflecting on the study of dead lovers, these essays also trace the development of themes and claims relating to our own investment in a "dead" but eroticized past that we seek to recover. The collection offers a sustained discussion of how scholarly interest in the representation of loss and erotic bonds raises pressing questions about nostalgia, performance, the role of affect in intellectual work, and the gendered cultural values that script the description and experience of the erotic. In its focus on loss as a site of affect and imagination, Dead Lovers offers an original and provocative contribution to the history of scholarship. Basil Dufallo is Assistant Professor of Greek and Latin and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Peggy McCracken is Professor of French and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan.
ISBN: 9780472115600Publication Date: 2007-01-10
Death and Dying by
Death is a constant in every society, but each of the world's cultures views the end of life differently. This book examines beliefs about dying, burial, and life after death held by peoples of wide ranging societies.
ISBN: 0895030128Publication Date: 1980-06-15
The Ethics of Mourning by
The Ethics of Mourning dramatically shifts the critical discussion of the lyric elegy from psychological economy to ethical responsibility. Beginning from a reevaluation of famously inconsolable mourners such as Niobe and Hamlet, R. Clifton Spargo discerns the tendency of all grief to depend at least temporarily upon the refusal of consolation. By disrupting the traditional social and psychological functions of grief, resistant mourners transform mourning into a profoundly ethical act. Spargo finds such examples of ethical mourning in opposition to socially acceptable expressions of grief throughout the English and American elegiac tradition. Drawing on the work of Paul Ricoeur, Bernard Williams, and Emmanuel Levinas, his book explores the ethical dimensions of anti-consolatory grief through astute readings of a wide range of texts--including treatments of Hamlet, Milton, and Renaissance elegists, extended readings of Dickinson, Shelley, and Hardy, and final chapters on American Holocaust elegies by Sylvia Plath and Randall Jarrell. Spargo argues that, to the extent that elegies are melancholic, to the extent that they resist the history of consolation and the strategies of commemoration implicit in elegiac conventions, they make an extraordinary ethical demand on us, asking that we remain in relationship to the other, even past the point of all usefulness. In the wake of the atrocities of the twentieth century, particularly the Holocaust, Spargo finds the crisis in the project of commemoration to be an event already inscribed with ethical meaning. He argues for the particular capacity of literature to undertake an imaginative risk on behalf of another that seems the very ground of ethics itself.
ISBN: 0801879779Publication Date: 2004-11-18
From Here to Eternity by
A New York Times and Los Angeles Times Bestseller The best-selling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with "dignity." Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for the dead. From Here to Eternity is an immersive global journey that introduces compelling, powerful rituals almost entirely unknown in America. In rural Indonesia, she watches a man clean and dress his grandfather's mummified body, which has resided in the family home for two years. In La Paz, she meets Bolivian ñatitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls), and in Tokyo she encounters the Japanese kotsuage ceremony, in which relatives use chopsticks to pluck their loved-ones' bones from cremation ashes. With boundless curiosity and gallows humor, Doughty vividly describes decomposed bodies and investigates the world's funerary history. She introduces deathcare innovators researching body composting and green burial, and examines how varied traditions, from Mexico's Días de los Muertos to Zoroastrian sky burial help us see our own death customs in a new light. Doughty contends that the American funeral industry sells a particular--and, upon close inspection, peculiar--set of "respectful" rites: bodies are whisked to a mortuary, pumped full of chemicals, and entombed in concrete. She argues that our expensive, impersonal system fosters a corrosive fear of death that hinders our ability to cope and mourn. By comparing customs, she demonstrates that mourners everywhere respond best when they help care for the deceased, and have space to participate in the process. Exquisitely illustrated by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity is an adventure into the morbid unknown, a story about the many fascinating ways people everywhere have confronted the very human challenge of mortality.
ISBN: 9780393249897Publication Date: 2017-10-03
The Funeral Kit by
Studies of mortuary archaeology tend to focus on differenceOCohow the researcher can identify age, gender, status, and ethnicity from the contents of a burial. Jill L. BakerOCOs innovative approach begins from the opposite point: how can you recognize the commonalities of a culture from the OC funeral kitOCO that occurs in all burials, irrespective of status differences? And what do those commonalities have to say about the world view and religious beliefs of that culture? Baker begins with the Middle and Late Bronze Age tombs in the southern Levant, then expands her scope in ever widening circles to create a general model of the funeral kit of use to archaeologists in a wide variety of cultures and settings. The volume will be of equal value to specialists in Near Eastern archaeology and those who study mortuary remains in ancient cultures worldwide.
ISBN: 9781598746730Publication Date: 2012-01-15
The Illustrated Egyptian Book of the Dead by
"See, is it not written in this scroll? Read, you who will discover it in future ages...Read, children of the future and learn the secrets of the best...." According to Egyptian religion, we are travelers in eternity who require initiation in a body of knowledge that will take us into death...and beyond. The Egyptian Book of the Dead serves as our guide on this journey, an indispensable spiritual map--and here is the essence of that timeless guide, the complete Papyrus of Hunefer, with illustrations on every page, translation, and commentary. Brilliantly drawn hieroglyphs match the monumental writing on the temple walls and even surpass them in quality and clarity. Prayers, breathing exercises for protection, the "negative confessions"--assertions you have not sinned--and other rituals draw you fully into the spiritual experience. An introduction to one of the most important texts ever written, presented in visually breathtaking style.
ISBN: 9780806926599Publication Date: 2001-06-30
In Lieu of Flowers by
With the curiosity of a child and the wisdom of an old soul, Nancy Cobb meets death in the most vital of places: in the lives of everyday people. In doing so she has found a way to infuse this darkest of subjects with light and wit. In Lieu of Flowers proves that what makes us cry can also make us laugh, what depresses us can also enlighten us. Cobb's candor and refreshing perspective make the deaths of those she has loved -- and death itself -- a subject to explore rather than avoid. Cobb's personal experiences become a point of departure for what amounts to a longer conversation about loss. She shares moments of her own mourning and draws others into the conversation as well: among them, a bank teller who still dreams of her deceased grandmother, two small children who bury a wild bird in its final nest beneath a maple tree, and a hospice nurse who acts as an end-of-life midwife. Presented naturally, each anecdote is delivered in a true, clear voice rather than in the hushed tones that too often accompany words of consolation. In telling her stories Cobb opens us up to our own, and she encourages us to accept and honor the "divine intersections" where the living meet the dying. Candid, powerful, and enlightening, this is an extraordinary treatment of one of the most ordinary and difficult experiences of life.
ISBN: 0375403418Publication Date: 2000-04-18
Leaving Words to Remember by
This volume examines the influence of literacy on the development of different genres of mourning in ancient Greece. The oral tradition of lament in the Homeric poems forms the point of departure for close readings of epigraphic material and written texts commemorating the dead in the archaic and classical periods, including grave epigrams, threnoi, tragedy, and Athenian epitaphioi. These texts reveal the non-linear development of Greek literacy and offer insight into the ongoing influence of lament in diverse poetic genres and the evolving uses of death and mourning in different media. In particular, the discussion focuses on the role of writing in commemorating soldiers and the evolution of the written memorial into a historical and civic medium of communication.
ISBN: 9047400453Publication Date: 2001-01-01
Lifting the Taboo by
lluminated by a profound yet humorous vision, Lifting the Taboo explores the specific relationship women of many colors, cultures, ages, and sexual orientations have to their own deaths, their attitudes towards loss, and their disposition to their role as primary care-givers to the dying.Specifically, the book weighs the implications of breast cancer and examines in detail Alzheimer's Disease which, contrary to popular myth, can in several significant ways be perceived as a women's disease. Investigating mothers' responses to children's deaths, Sally Cline establishes that women's relationships to death are intricately connected to the experience of giving birth. They are, she argues, therefore psychologically and emotionally different from those of men. Cline goes on to examine women's roles and responses to AIDS and suicide, women's sexual relationships while dying, how society views widows as leftover lives, and women's radical work in hospices and death therapy, as well as their roles as female funeral directors.
ISBN: 0814713661Publication Date: 1997-03-01
Musings on Mortality by
"All art and the love of art," Victor Brombert writes at the beginning of the deeply personal Musings on Mortality, "allow us to negate our nothingness." As a young man returning from World War II, Brombert came to understand this truth as he immersed himself in literature. Death can be found everywhere in literature, he saw, but literature itself is on the side of life. With delicacy and penetrating insight, Brombert traces the theme of mortality in the work of a group of authors who wrote during the past century and a half, teasing out and comparing their views of death as they emerged from vastly different cultural contexts. Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Giorgio Bassani, J. M. Coetzee, and Primo Levi--these are the writers whose works Brombert plumbs, illuminating their views on the meaning of life and the human condition. But there is more to their work, he shows, than a pervasive interest in mortality: they wrote not only of physical death but also of the threat of moral and spiritual death--and as the twentieth century progressed, they increasingly reflected on the traumatic events of their times and the growing sense of a collective historical tragedy. He probes the individual struggle with death, for example, through Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych and Mann's Aschenbach, while he explores the destruction of whole civilizations in Bassani, Camus, and Primo Levi. For Kafka and Woolf, writing seems to hold the promise of salvation, though that promise is seen as ambiguous and even deceptive, while Coetzee, writing about violence and apartheid South Africa, is deeply concerned with a sense of disgrace. Throughout the book, Brombert roots these writers' reflections in philosophical meditations on mortality. Ultimately, he reveals that by understanding how these authors wrote about mortality, we can grasp the full scope of their literary achievement and vision. Drawing deeply from the well of Brombert's own experience, Musings on Mortality is more than mere literary criticism: it is a moving and elegant book for all to learn and live by.
ISBN: 9780226062358Publication Date: 2013-10-15
Ojibwe Singers by
The Ojibwe or Anishinaabe are a native American people of the northern Great Lakes region. 19th-century missionaries promoted the singing of evangelical hymns translated into the Ojibwe language as a tool for rooting out their "indianness," but the Ojibwe have ritualized the singing to make the hymns their own. In this book, McNally relates the history and current practice of Ojibwe hymn singing to explore the broader cultural processes that place ritual resources at the center of so many native struggles to negotiate the confines of colonialism.
ISBN: 0195134648Publication Date: 2000-09-21
A Spirit of Dialogue by
A groundbreaking study, A Spirit of Dialogue examines through extensive, interdisciplinary research, theory, and close reading the intricate reconstructions, extensions, and resonances of the West African myth of spirit children, the "Born-to-Die," in contemporary African American neo-slave narratives. Arguing that the myth, called "Ogbañje" in Igbo language and "àbíkú" in Yoruba, has had over thirty years of uncharted presence in African American literature, Okonkwo advances a compelling case absent in extant scholarship. He traces Ogbañje/the Born-to-Die's appearance in African American texts to a convergence of factors. They include but are not limited to: the impact of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart; the 1960s emergence of the contemporary neo-slave narrative; the 1960s and 1970s black consciousness/Black Power movement and the cultural agenda, gendered politics, and centripetal philosophy of the Black Arts movement's nationalist aesthetic; African American identity questions of the post-civil rights and the multicultural eras; and the thematic shifts, as well as the African diaspora orientation of African American fiction of the post-nationalist aesthetic period. A Spirit of Dialogue focuses on the sometimes neglected and understudied works of four canonical African American writers: Octavia E. Butler's Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind, Tananarive Due's The Between, John Edgar Wideman's The Cattle Killing, and Toni Morrison's Sula and Beloved. Okonkwo demonstrates persuasively how the mythic spirit child informs the content and form of these novels, offering Butler, Due, Wideman, and Morrison a non-occidental "code" by which to engage collectively with the various issues integral to the history experience of African-descended people. The paradigm functions, then, as the nexus of a life-affirmative dialogue among the six novels, as well as between them and other works of African religious and literary imagination, particularly Things Fall Apart and Ben Okri's The Famished Road.
ISBN: 9781572336155Publication Date: 2008-05-01
