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Matterightblooming Phenomenon: using George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo to theorise the literariness of Western Death
The fact that death is unknowable is, as Richard A. Cohen points out, quite simply “common sense”. But death – that is, what it is like to really die and what happens to us after we are dead – is a very special kind of unknown, one that is by its very nature unknowable, and one that puts tremendous...
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| Language: | English English |
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Department of English Language and Literature
2026
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| _version_ | 1869483639921704960 |
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| access_status_str | Open Access |
| author | Devy, Shannon |
| author2 | Anderson, Peter |
| author_browse | Anderson, Peter Devy, Shannon |
| author_facet | Anderson, Peter Devy, Shannon |
| author_sort | Devy, Shannon |
| collection | Thesis |
| description | The fact that death is unknowable is, as Richard A. Cohen points out, quite simply “common sense”. But death – that is, what it is like to really die and what happens to us after we are dead – is a very special kind of unknown, one that is by its very nature unknowable, and one that puts tremendous pressure on our conceptual and symbolic systems, to interesting effects. Death's total withdrawal not only disrupts the order of representation and untethers the symbolic (for example, detaching the proper name from the body so it circulates without it, or robbing the word “loss” of its subject), but it also refuses the position of noema. As a result, as Critchley, Godly, Lacan and others have argued, death is un-experienceable, unobservable, unspeakable and even unthinkable. In order to apprehend death in our lives, we fill the void beyond the death-line with powerful literary material: metaphors, stories, myths, narratives, oral traditions, all of which “stand in” for death. This is a fundamental yet oddly under-theorised feature of death: we cannot apprehend death without deploying the literary, so death and the literary are inextricably tangled, always paired, and possibly one and the same. This dissertation aims to make an argument for the literariness of Western death, attempting to show that death's total withdrawal means it is only accessible to the living through creative, imaginative and, indeed, literary processes and materials. Building upon existing work by Critchley, Zupančič, Godly and others, it attempts to theorise both death as extra generative and the double-work of afterlife narratives. Drawing on the works of Blanchot, Derrida, and others, it surfaces and examines some of the deep entanglements between death, language and creativity, exploring the ways in which death is situated at the heart of the creative process itself and the connection between the corpse and the corpus, while expanding Blanchot's notion of the creative act as facsimile death by proposing ways in which this may be true. Lastly, it deploys George Saunders' extraordinary afterlife vision, Lincoln in the Bardo, to examine and theorise some of the ways Western death's literariness manifests in our day-to day handling of death, including applying Foucault's notion of the heterotopia to death for the first time, positioning euphemism and metaphor as “death's favourite devices”, and applying Blumenberg's concept of the absolute metaphor to death. |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/43316 |
| institution | University of Cape Town (South Africa) |
| language | English eng |
| last_indexed | 2026-07-01T04:02:12.335Z |
| license_str | Not specified — see source repository |
| provenance_str_mv | Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| publishDateRange | 2026 |
| publishDateSort | 2026 |
| publisher | Department of English Language and Literature |
| publisherStr | Department of English Language and Literature |
| record_format | dspace |
| source_str | UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| spelling | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/43316 Matterightblooming Phenomenon: using George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo to theorise the literariness of Western Death Devy, Shannon Anderson, Peter Busuku, Sindiswa Literature The fact that death is unknowable is, as Richard A. Cohen points out, quite simply “common sense”. But death – that is, what it is like to really die and what happens to us after we are dead – is a very special kind of unknown, one that is by its very nature unknowable, and one that puts tremendous pressure on our conceptual and symbolic systems, to interesting effects. Death's total withdrawal not only disrupts the order of representation and untethers the symbolic (for example, detaching the proper name from the body so it circulates without it, or robbing the word “loss” of its subject), but it also refuses the position of noema. As a result, as Critchley, Godly, Lacan and others have argued, death is un-experienceable, unobservable, unspeakable and even unthinkable. In order to apprehend death in our lives, we fill the void beyond the death-line with powerful literary material: metaphors, stories, myths, narratives, oral traditions, all of which “stand in” for death. This is a fundamental yet oddly under-theorised feature of death: we cannot apprehend death without deploying the literary, so death and the literary are inextricably tangled, always paired, and possibly one and the same. This dissertation aims to make an argument for the literariness of Western death, attempting to show that death's total withdrawal means it is only accessible to the living through creative, imaginative and, indeed, literary processes and materials. Building upon existing work by Critchley, Zupančič, Godly and others, it attempts to theorise both death as extra generative and the double-work of afterlife narratives. Drawing on the works of Blanchot, Derrida, and others, it surfaces and examines some of the deep entanglements between death, language and creativity, exploring the ways in which death is situated at the heart of the creative process itself and the connection between the corpse and the corpus, while expanding Blanchot's notion of the creative act as facsimile death by proposing ways in which this may be true. Lastly, it deploys George Saunders' extraordinary afterlife vision, Lincoln in the Bardo, to examine and theorise some of the ways Western death's literariness manifests in our day-to day handling of death, including applying Foucault's notion of the heterotopia to death for the first time, positioning euphemism and metaphor as “death's favourite devices”, and applying Blumenberg's concept of the absolute metaphor to death. 2026-06-12T12:37:15Z 2026-06-12T12:37:15Z 2026 2026-06-12T12:35:01Z Thesis / Dissertation Masters MA http://hdl.handle.net/11427/43316 en eng application/pdf Department of English Language and Literature Faculty of Humanities University of Cape Town |
| spellingShingle | Literature Devy, Shannon Matterightblooming Phenomenon: using George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo to theorise the literariness of Western Death |
| thesis_degree_str | Master's |
| title | Matterightblooming Phenomenon: using George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo to theorise the literariness of Western Death |
| title_full | Matterightblooming Phenomenon: using George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo to theorise the literariness of Western Death |
| title_fullStr | Matterightblooming Phenomenon: using George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo to theorise the literariness of Western Death |
| title_full_unstemmed | Matterightblooming Phenomenon: using George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo to theorise the literariness of Western Death |
| title_short | Matterightblooming Phenomenon: using George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo to theorise the literariness of Western Death |
| title_sort | matterightblooming phenomenon using george saunders lincoln in the bardo to theorise the literariness of western death |
| topic | Literature |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/11427/43316 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT devyshannon matterightbloomingphenomenonusinggeorgesaunderslincolninthebardototheorisetheliterarinessofwesterndeath |