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This book sustains a critical glance at the ways in which we attend
to the corpse, tracing a trajectory from encounter toward
considering options for disposal: veneered mortuary internment,
green burial and its attendant rot, cremation and alkaline
hydrolysis, donation and display, and ecological burial. Through
tracing the possible futures of the dead that haunt the living,
through both the stories that we tell and physical manifestations
following the end of life, we expose the workings of aesthetics
that shape corpses, as well as the ways in which corpses spill
over, resisting aestheticization. This book creates a space for
ritualized practices surrounding death: corpse disposal; corpse
aesthetics that shape both practices attendant upon and
representations of the corpse; and literary, figural, and cultural
representations that deploy these practices to tell a story about
dead bodies-about their separation from the living, about their
disposability, and ultimately about the living who survive the
dead, if only for a while. There is an aesthetics of erasure
persistently at work on the dead body. It must be quickly hidden
from sight to shield us from the certain trauma of our own demise,
or so the unspoken argument goes. Experts-scientists, forensic
specialists, death-care professionals, and law enforcement-are the
only ones qualified to view the dead for any extended period of
time. The rest of us, with only brief doses, inoculate ourselves
from the materiality of death in complex and highly ritualized
ceremonies. Beyond participating in the project of restoring our
sense of finitude, we try to make sense of the untouchable,
unviewable, haunting, and taboo presence of the corpse itself.
This book takes a critical glance at the ways in which we attend to
the corpse, tracing a trajectory from encounter toward considering
options for disposal: veneered mortuary internment, green burial
and its attendant rot, cremation and alkaline hydrolysis, donation
and display, and ecological burial. Through tracing the possible
futures of the dead that haunt the living, through both the stories
that we tell and physical manifestations following the end of life,
we expose the workings of aesthetics that shape corpses, as well as
the ways in which corpses spill over, resisting aestheticization.
This book creates a space for ritualized practices surrounding
death: corpse disposal; corpse aesthetics that shape both practices
attendant upon and representations of the corpse; and literary,
figural, and cultural representations that deploy these practices
to tell a story about dead bodies-about their separation from the
living, about their disposability, and ultimately about the living
who survive the dead, if only for a while. There is an aesthetics
of erasure persistently at work on the dead body. It must be
quickly hidden from sight to shield us from the certain trauma of
our own demise, or so the unspoken argument goes.
Experts-scientists, forensic specialists, death-care professionals,
and law enforcement-are the only ones qualified to view the dead
for any extended period of time. The rest of us, with only brief
doses, inoculate ourselves from the materiality of death in complex
and highly ritualized ceremonies. Beyond participating in the
project of restoring our sense of finitude, we try to make sense of
the untouchable, unviewable, haunting, and taboo presence of the
corpse itself.
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