Download or read book Narrative Mortality written by Catherine Russell and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What seems like closure might be something more, as Catherine Russell shows us in this book about death in narrative cinema since the 1950s. Analyzing the structural importance of death in narrative endings, as well as the thematics of loss and redemption, Russell identifies mortality as a valuable critical tool for understanding the cinema of the second half of the twentieth century. Her work includes close textual readings of films by Fritz Lang, Wim Wenders, Oshima Nagisa, Jean-Luc Godard, and Robert Altman, among others. In these analyses, Russell reveals an uneasy relationship between death and closure, which she traces to anxieties about identity, gender, and national-cultural myths, and also to the persistence of desire. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, she shows us death as a fundamentally allegorical structure in cinema - and as a potential sign of historical difference, with crucial implications for theories of film narrative and spectatorship. "Narrative Mortality" provides an insight into the dynamics of postmodern cinema as it emerged from the modernist preoccupation with existential mortality. By tracing the role of death from a work that precedes the Brechtian cinema of the 60s ("Beyond a reasonable doubt") to several that succeed it ("Nashville", "The State of things"), the book expands the narrative project of new wave cinema and ushers it onto a broad historical plane.
Download or read book Narrative Identity Autonomy and Mortality written by John J. Davenport and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last two decades, interest in narrative conceptions of identity has grown exponentially, though there is little agreement about what a "life-narrative" might be. In connecting Kierkegaard with virtue ethics, several scholars have recently argued that narrative models of selves and MacIntyre's concept of the unity of a life help make sense of Kierkegaard's existential stages and, in particular, explain the transition from "aesthetic" to "ethical" modes of life. But others have recently raised difficult questions both for these readings of Kierkegaard and for narrative accounts of identity that draw on the work of MacIntyre in general. While some of these objections concern a strong kind of unity or "wholeheartedness" among an agent's long-term goals or cares, the fundamental objection raised by critics is that personal identity cannot be a narrative, since stories are artifacts made by persons. In this book, Davenport defends the narrative approach to practical identity and autonomy in general, and to Kierkegaard's stages in particular.
Download or read book Narratives of Parental Death Dying and Bereavement written by Caroline Pearce and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection shows what happens when facing the inevitable and sometimes expected death of a parent, and how such an ordinary part of life as parental death might connect with the children left behind. In many ways, individual deaths are extraordinary and leave a unique legacy – a kind of haunting. The authors' accounts seek to make sense of death through witnessing its enactment and recording its detail. All the authors are experienced researchers in the field of death studies, and their collective expertise encompasses ethnography, psychology, sociology and anthropology. The individual descriptions of death and grief capture the everyday practicalities of managing death and dying, including, for example, the difficulties of caring responsibilities and the realities of dealing with strained family relationships. These accounts show the raw detail of death; they are deeply personal observations framed within critical theories. As established scholars and practitioners that have researched and worked in end-of-life and bereavement care, the authors in this anthology offer a unique perspective on how identity is shaped by a close bereavement. The book employs a strong editorial narrative that blends memoir with theoretical engagement, and will be of interest to death studies scholars, as well as practitioners involved in end-of-life care and bereavement care and anyone who has experienced the death of a parent.
Download or read book Immortality and the Philosophy of Death written by Michael Cholbi and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-12-02 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of seminal articles investigating whether death is bad for us – and if so, whether immortality would be good for us.
Download or read book Illness as Narrative written by Ann Jurečič and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2012-03-12 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most of literary history, personal confessions about illness were considered too intimate to share publicly. By the mid-twentieth century, however, a series of events set the stage for the emergence of the illness narrative. The increase of chronic disease, the transformation of medicine into big business, the women's health movement, the AIDS/HIV pandemic, the advent of inexpensive paperbacks, and the rise of self-publishing all contributed to the proliferation of narratives about encounters with medicine and mortality. While the illness narrative is now a staple of the publishing industry, the genre itself has posed a problem for literary studies. What is the role of criticism in relation to personal accounts of suffering? Can these narratives be judged on aesthetic grounds? Are they a collective expression of the lost intimacy of the patient-doctor relationship? Is their function thus instrumental—to elicit the reader's empathy? To answer these questions, Ann Jurecic turns to major works on pain and suffering by Susan Sontag, Elaine Scarry, and Eve Sedgwick and reads these alongside illness narratives by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Reynolds Price, and Anne Fadiman, among others. In the process, she defines the subgenres of risk and pain narratives and explores a range of critical responses guided, alternately, by narrative empathy, the hermeneutics of suspicion, and the practice of reparative reading. Illness as Narrative seeks to draw wider attention to this form of life writing and to argue for new approaches to both literary criticism and teaching narrative. Jurecic calls for a practice that's both compassionate and critical. She asks that we consider why writers compose stories of illness, how readers receive them, and how both use these narratives to make meaning of human fragility and mortality.
Download or read book Tilting at Mortality written by David M. Craig and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work considers Joseph Heller's career and examines each of his novels, including Closing Time. It pursues two complementary tracks: first it explores the evolution of Heller's treatment of human morality; and second, it delineates Heller's artistic developments as a novelist.
Download or read book Death and Closure in Biblical Narrative written by Walter B. Crouch and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2000 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inherent in every story is a view of death that reflects the human struggle of ending well, a Freudian thanatos inscribed within narrative. As a story draws to a close, the view of death found within the structure of the story's narrative will influence the ending that is produced. To examine the view of death and the closing strategies employed within a narrative, this study proposes a literary category called «narrative mortality.» Narrative mortality compares the degree of finality given to death with the amount of closure the reader experiences within the narrative. The narrative mortality of three differing biblical stories are studied within this work: The Gospel of John, the Book of Job, and the Book of Jonah. Each story employs a differing rhetorical strategy that reflects its own unique view of death and narrative closure.
Download or read book Mortality written by Christopher Hitchens and published by Atlantic Books Ltd. This book was released on 2012-08-25 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world's greatest contrarian confronts his own death in this brave and unforgettable book. During the American book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest. As he would later write in the first of a series of deeply moving Vanity Fair pieces, he was being deported 'from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.' Over the next year he experienced the full force of modern cancer treatment. Mortality is at once an unsparingly honest account of the ravages of his disease, an examination of cancer etiquette, and the coda to a lifetime of fierce debate and peerless prose. In this moving personal account of illness, Hitchens confronts his own death - and he is combative and dignified, eloquent and witty to the very last.
Download or read book Partial Stories written by Claire L. Wendland and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-04-22 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Partial Stories takes readers to Malawi, where roughly one in twenty women can expect to die of a pregnancy or childbirth complication, despite decades of safe-motherhood programs. The stories of these mothers are told in hospitals and villages, by chiefs and doctors, herbalists and nurses, epidemiologists and healers, and competing explanations proliferate. The mothers' stories are used by elders for technical education and moral instruction at a coming-of-age-ritual, a district hospital's mortality review, and in the reflected glow of a computer screen at an international conference. After orienting readers to urban Malawi's context of therapeutic pluralism and material scarcity, Claire Wendland discusses the ways various experts account for maternal death, showing how their diverse explanations reflect competing visions of the past and shared concerns about social change. She looks to a series of pregnancy-related deaths in order to consider bodies as biosocial phenomena, shaped from before birth by history and social inequality. Wendland reveals an uneven therapeutic landscape that pushes experts to improvise, clinically and ethically. Their creative, essential, and sometimes deadly improvisations ask us to reconsider the "best practice" dogmas of global health and transnational research, as well as the nature of medical authority and expertise. Wendland demonstrates how strategies of legitimation render care more dangerous and knowledge more partial than it might otherwise be"--
Download or read book The Infinite Staircase written by Geoffrey A. Moore and published by BenBella Books. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAUTILUS BOOK AWARD GOLD MEDALIST — BODY, MIND, SPIRIT PRACTICES “Combining an extraordinary range of scholarship with an accessible and entertaining writing style, The Infinite Staircase . . . provides a coherent and unified platform for a full human life.” —Midwest Book Review In this bold new book, high-tech’s best-known strategist makes a seminal contribution to the search for meaning in a secular era. Two questions fundamental to human existence have always been the metaphysical “where do I fit in the grand scheme of things?” and the ethical “how should I behave?” Religion is no longer a source of answers for many people, and nothing has replaced it. Moore uses his signature framework-based approach to answer these questions, taking us on an intellectual roller coaster ride through physics, chemistry, biology, the social sciences and the humanities. Along the way, he builds a metaphorical ladder that leads from the big bang to the need for ethical action in our daily lives. Combining an extraordinary range of scholarship with an accessible and entertaining writing style, The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality provides a coherent and unified platform for a full human life.
Download or read book Smallpox The Death of a Disease written by D. A. Henderson, M.D. and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2009-09-25 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than 3000 years, hundreds of millions of people have died or been left permanently scarred or blind by the relentless, incurable disease called smallpox. In 1967, Dr. D.A. Henderson became director of a worldwide campaign to eliminate this disease from the face of the earth. This spellbinding book is Dr. Henderson’s personal story of how he led the World Health Organization’s campaign to eradicate smallpox—the only disease in history to have been deliberately eliminated. Some have called this feat "the greatest scientific and humanitarian achievement of the past century." In a lively, engrossing narrative, Dr. Henderson makes it clear that the gargantuan international effort involved more than straightforward mass vaccination. He and his staff had to cope with civil wars, floods, impassable roads, and refugees as well as formidable bureaucratic and cultural obstacles, shortages of local health personnel and meager budgets. Countries across the world joined in the effort; the United States and the Soviet Union worked together through the darkest cold war days; and professionals from more than 70 nations served as WHO field staff. On October 26, 1976, the last case of smallpox occurred. The disease that annually had killed two million people or more had been vanquished–and in just over ten years. The story did not end there. Dr. Henderson recounts in vivid detail the continuing struggle over whether to destroy the remaining virus in the two laboratories still that held it. Then came the startling discovery that the Soviet Union had been experimenting with smallpox virus as a biological weapon and producing it in large quantities. The threat of its possible use by a rogue nation or a terrorist has had to be taken seriously and Dr. Henderson has been a central figure in plans for coping with it. New methods for mass smallpox vaccination were so successful that he sought to expand the program of smallpox immunization to include polio, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, and tetanus vaccines. That program now reaches more than four out of five children in the world and is eradicating poliomyelitis. This unique book is to be treasured—a personal and true story that proves that through cooperation and perseverance the most daunting of obstacles can be overcome.
Download or read book Narrative Mortality written by Catherine Russell and published by Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms International. This book was released on 1990 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Confessions of a Funeral Director written by Caleb Wilde and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The blogger behind Confessions of a Funeral Director—what Time magazine called a "must read"—reflects on mortality and the powerful lessons death holds for every one of us in this compassionate and thoughtful spiritual memoir that combines the humor and insight of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes with the poignancy and brevity of When Breath Becomes Air. We are a people who deeply fear death. While humans are biologically wired to evade death for as long as possible, we have become too adept at hiding from it, vilifying it, and—when it can be avoided no longer—letting the professionals take over. Sixth-generation funeral director Caleb Wilde understands this reticence and fear. He had planned to get as far away from the family business as possible. He wanted to make a difference in the world, and how could he do that if all the people he worked with were . . . dead? Slowly, he discovered that caring for the deceased and their loved ones was making a difference—in other people’s lives to be sure, but it also seemed to be saving his own. A spirituality of death began to emerge as he observed: The family who lovingly dressed their deceased father for his burial The act of embalming a little girl that offered a gift back to her grieving family The nursing home that honored a woman’s life by standing in procession as her body was taken away The funeral that united a conflicted community Through stories like these, told with equal parts humor and poignancy, Wilde offers an intimate look into the business and a new perspective on living and dying
Download or read book The Eye of Minds The Mortality Doctrine Book One written by James Dashner and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world is virtual, but the danger is real in book one of the bestselling Mortality Doctrine series, the next phenomenon from the author of the Maze Runner series, James Dashner. Includes a sneak peek of The Fever Code, the highly-anticipated conclusion to the Maze Runner series—the novel that finally reveals how the maze was built! The VirtNet offers total mind and body immersion, and the more hacking skills you have, the more fun it is. Why bother following the rules when it’s so easy to break them? But some rules were made for a reason. Some technology is too dangerous to fool with. And one gamer has been doing exactly that, with murderous results. The government knows that to catch a hacker, you need a hacker. And they’ve been watching Michael. If he accepts their challenge, Michael will need to go off the VirtNet grid, to the back alleys and corners of the system human eyes have never seen—and it’s possible that the line between game and reality will be blurred forever. The author who brought you the #1 New York Times bestselling MAZE RUNNER series and two #1 movies—The Maze Runner and The Scorch Trials—now brings you an electrifying adventure trilogy an edge-of-your-seat adventure that takes you into a world of hyperadvanced technology, cyber terrorists, and gaming beyond your wildest dreams . . . and your worst nightmares. Praise for the Bestselling MORTALITY DOCTRINE series: “Dashner takes full advantage of the Matrix-esque potential for asking ‘what is real.’” —io9.com “Set in a world taken over by virtual reality gaming, the series perfectly capture[s] Dashner’s hallmarks for inventiveness, teen dialogue and an ability to add twists and turns like no other author.” —MTV.com “A brilliant, visceral, gamified mash-up of The Matrix and Inception, guaranteed to thrill even the non-gaming crowd.” —Christian Science Monitor
Download or read book Before I Die written by Candy Chang and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After losing someone she loved, artist Candy Chang painted the side of an abandoned house in her New Orleans neighborhood with chalkboard paint and stenciled the sentence, "Before I die I want to _____." Within a day of the wall's completion, it was covered in colorful chalk dreams as neighbors stopped and reflected on their lives. Since then, more than four hundred Before I Die walls have been created by people all over the world. This beautiful hardcover book is an inspiring celebration of these walls and the stories behind them. Filled with hope, fear, humor, and heartbreak, Before I Die presents an intimate portrait of the dreams within our communities and a chance to ponder life's ultimate question.
Download or read book Death and Survival in the Book of Job written by Dan Mathewson and published by T&T Clark. This book was released on 2006-06-05 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I interpret the Book of Job as literature of survival, reading the death imagery in Job as the complex articulation of traumatic experience.
Download or read book The Death Class written by Erika Hayasaki and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poignant, “powerful” (The Boston Globe) look at how to appreciate life from an extraordinary professor who teaches about death: “Poetic passages and assorted revelations you’ll likely not forget” (Chicago Tribune). Why does a college course on death have a three-year waiting list? When nurse Norma Bowe decided to teach a course on death at a college in New Jersey, she never expected it to be popular. But year after year students crowd into her classroom, and the reason is clear: Norma’s “death class” is really about how to make the most of what poet Mary Oliver famously called our “one wild and precious life.” Under the guise of discussions about last wills and last breaths and visits to cemeteries and crematoriums, Norma teaches her students to find grace in one another. In The Death Class, award-winning journalist Erika Hayasaki followed Norma for more than four years, showing how she steers four extraordinary students from their tormented families and neighborhoods toward happiness: she rescues one young woman from her suicidal mother, helps a young man manage his schizophrenic brother, and inspires another to leave his gang life behind. Through this unorthodox class on death, Norma helps kids who are barely hanging on to understand not only the value of their own lives, but also the secret of fulfillment: to throw yourself into helping others. Hayasaki’s expert reporting and literary prose bring Norma’s wisdom out of the classroom, transforming it into an inspiring lesson for all. In the end, Norma’s very own life—and how she lives it—is the lecture that sticks. “Readers will come away struck by Bowe’s compassion—and by the unexpectedly life-affirming messages of courage that spring from her students’ harrowing experiences” (Entertainment Weekly).
