Thanatographies: Love, Loss, and Central European Literature

A seminar by Jan Musil (Charles University, Prague) as a part of the School of Language, Literatures and Cultural Studies Seminar Series (SLLCS).

Speaker: 
Jan Musil is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Charles University in Prague. His doctoral thesis Thanatographies: Modes of Literary Grief investigates the role of grief writing in the second half of the 20th century. He was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the University of Cambridge, and University College London, and a research associate at the French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences in Prague. He is an poet, translator, and editor of Plav, a Czech translation monthly. His other research topics include sports in literature, intermediality, and the cultural dynamics and ethics of death in genre literature and film.
Synopsis
If biographies are narratives of life, thanatographies are narratives of death. But are they a genre, a mode of writing, or even of reading? This talk seeks answers by examining mourning writing, the prototypical thanatographic mode, where death intersects with love and loss. Reinterpreting Freud’s seminal essay Mourning and Melancholia—often used to frame mourning-related fiction—I introduce, alongside Freud’s “work of grief,” the complementary notion of a “play of grief,” drawing on Derrida and Winnicott. This framework grounds a mid-range tropological reading of comparative Central European examples of literary mourning by Peter Handke, Péter Esterházy, Bohumil Hrabal, Josef Winkler, Friederike Mayröcker, Bohumila Grögerová, and Daniela Hodrová. These works, rooted in real-life experiences of loss, reveal different ways literature negotiates grief, where death is not merely a subject but the very condition of writing. Finally, engaging Jan Patočka’s posthumously published essay The Phenomenology of Life After Death, I explore the relevance of mourning writing for confronting death in a post-metaphysical age. The talk concludes with sketches of future investigations: the “pornography of death” in the true-crime genre, and the dialectic of individual and environmental grief.

The School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies Seminar Series (SLLCS) promotes Literary and Cultural Studies, including political and social thought, narratology and imagology, film, textual and visual studies, questions surrounding language learning and translation studies, and also practice-led research. We encourage comparative, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, as our intellectual inquiry is in the service of national and international debate and knowledge advancement, particularly on the construction of identity and otherness in literature and culture. The seminar series provides a forum for the dissemination and exchange of current and developing research from staff and postgraduate researchers within the school, and also from national and international guest speakers.

Please indicate if you have any access requirements, such as ISL/English interpreting, so that we can facilitate you in attending this event. Contact: hanrahaj@tcd.ie