Elegiac Subjunctive, or Secular Variations on Posthumous Personhood

David Sherman

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Chapter 4 Elegiac Subjunctive, or Secular Variations on Posthumous Personhood

In: The Contemporary Elegy in World Literature

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David Sherman

David Sherman
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 76–89

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004723603_006

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Abstract

This essay explores the secular imaginary of contemporary elegy, with a focus on writers in the U.S. Comparing recent poems by Natasha Trethewey, Danez Smith, and Sam Sax, primarily, I examine variations in the figure of apostrophe addressed to the dead as imaginative critiques of secular hope. These poets use precarious forms of apostrophe to explore the conceptual impasse of posthumous personhood in a secular social world. Their writing disperses this foreclosed subjectivity across other effects, sites, and practices, as an ethical world-building agency. These lyrical attempts to imagine a secular social ontology of being with the dead articulate powerful possibilities for political justice and passionate attachment.

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The Contemporary Elegy in World Literature

Series: DQR Studies in Literature Online, Volume: 66/1, DQR Studies in the Lyric, Volume: 66/1, and DQR Studies in Literature, Volume: 66/1

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004723603

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 14 Jan 2025

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Chapter 4 Elegiac Subjunctive, or Secular Variations on Posthumous Personhood

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The Contemporary Elegy in World Literature

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