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.

A book of remarkable breadth and acuity, Spargo's The Ethics of Mourning powerfully reorients critical discussion of the elegy away from the survivor's inner struggle for consolation to the dialogic relation between the survivor and the dead. In a series of bracing, rigorous, and unflinching readings, this book explores the ethics of mourning with more philosophical vigor and literary reach than any critical work to date. -- Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia

About the Author
R. Clifton Spargo has taught American literature at Marquette University and creative writing at Yale University. In 2000-2001 he was the Pearl Resnick Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Reviews
Spargo challenges traditional ideas about mourning. Choice 2005 Engaging and wide-ranging study. -- Patricia Phillippy Shakespeare Yearbook 2007



Book Information
ISBN 9780801879777
Author R. Clifton Spargo
Format Hardback
Page Count 328
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 567g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 24mm