Suicide in Modern Literature

Social Causes, Existential Reasons, and Prevention Strategies

Buch | Softcover

XXIX, 305 Seiten

2021 | 1st ed. 2021
Springer International Publishing (Verlag)
978-3-030-69391-6 (ISBN)

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This book analyzes the social and contextual causes of suicide, the existential and philosophical reasons for committing suicide, and the prevention strategies that modern fictional literature places at our disposal. They go through the review of Modern fictional literature, in the American and European geographical framework, following the rationales that modern literature based on fiction can serve the purpose of understanding better the phenomenon of suicide, its most inaccessible impulses, and that has the potential to prevent suicide.
From the turn of the 20th century to the present, debates over the meaning of suicide became a privileged site for efforts to discover the reasons why people commit suicide and how to prevent this behavior. Since the French sociologist and philosopher Émile Durkheim published his study Suicide: A Study in Sociology in 1897, a reframing of suicide took place, giving rise to a flourishing group of researchers and authors devoting their efforts to understand better the causes of suicide and to the formation of suicide prevention organizations. A century later, we still keep on trying to reach such an understanding of suicide, the nature, and nuances of its modern conceptualization, to prevent suicidal behaviors.
The question of what suicide means in and for modernity is not an overcome one. Suicide is an act that touches all of our lives and engages with the incomprehensible and unsayable. Since the turn of the millennium, a fierce debate about the state's role in assisted suicide has been adopted. Beyond the discussion as to whether physicians should assist in the suicide of patients with unbearable and hopeless suffering, the scope of the suicidal agency is much broader concerning general people wanting to die.

lt;p>Josefa Ros Velasco is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Complutense University of Madrid, Spain (2019-2021). Prior to this, she was a Teaching Assistant and a Postdoctoral Researcher at Harvard University (2017-2019). She holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy with International Mention (2017, Complutense University of Madrid) with Extraordinary Doctorate Award, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Education. She is the president of the International Society of Boredom Studies.

She is the author of many academic papers such as "Hans Blumenberg's Philosophical Anthropology of Boredom" (Karl Alber, 2018), "Boredom: humanising or dehumanising treatment" (Vernon, 2018); or "Boredom: A Comprehensive Study of the State of Affairs" (Thémata, 2017). She is also the editor of the books Boredom is In Your Mind. A Shared Psychological-Philosophical Approach (Springer, 2019); The Culture of Boredom (Brill, 2020); The Faces of Depression in Literature (Peter Lang, 2020); and La enfermedad del aburrimiento (forthcoming, 2021).

Chapter 1. Introduction. Psychology, Suicide, and Literature.- Chapter 2. Suicide and the Interpretation of Modernity: Edith Wharton's Early Fictions.- Chapter 3. Suicide Across the Waves: On the Feminist Possibilities of Dramatic Suicide in Plays by Susan Glaspell, Marsha Norman, and Naomi Wallace.- Chapter 4. The Gendering of Suicidal Agency in Jeffrey Eugenide's The Virgin Suicides.- Chapter 5. Magic Friend, Beggar Maid and The Fair Princess, Method Actress and Loving Mother: Fantasies of Love, Loss, and Desire in Joyce Carole Oates' Fictional Account of Norma Jeane's Reality.- Chapter 6. Suicide Is Not for the Poor: Self-death in Veristi Authors, Luigi Capuana, and Giovanni Verga.- Chapter 7. Irony, Suicide, and Social Criticism in Margarita Nelken's Short Novel: Mi suicidio (1924).- Chapter 8. The True Life in the False One (Das wahre Leben im falschen). Suicide Attempts of Literary Heroes in Eastern German Literature.- Chapter 9. The Life of Others. Marx and Durkheim on Suicide and Social Good(s).- Chapter 10. Desire of Death, Suicide, and Salvation: Problems with Eternity in Miguel de Unamuno.- Chapter 11. "The End of the World? Let Me Die." Guido Morselli's Dissipatio H. G. between Suicide and Mankind's Dissolution.- Chapter 12. The Existential and Suicidal Crisis in the Work of Walker Percy.- Chapter 13. What Darkness Reveals: A Look at Depression and Suicide in the Works of William Styron.- Chapter 14. Ecological Metaphors: Suicide Versus Life in Paulo Coelho's Veronika Decides to Die.- Chapter 15. Intertextuality and the Opposition to Suicide and Assisted Suicide in the Netherlands - The Case of Joost Zwagerman.- Chapter 16. Suicide in Contemporary Young Adult Novels.- Chapter 17. 'Our Precarious Selves': Suicide and Autoimmunity in Yiyun Li.- Chapter 18. Epilogue. Leaving One's Comfort Zone in the Classroom.

Erscheinungsdatum	03.12.2021
Zusatzinfo	XXIX, 305 p.
Verlagsort	Cham
Sprache	englisch
Maße	155 x 235 mm
Gewicht	513 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Sozialpsychologie
Schlagworte	Creative writing and reading • Literature about suicide • Philosophy of suicide • Sociology of suicide • Strategies to prevent suicide • Suicidal behavior • Suicide in fictional literature • suicidology
ISBN-10	3-030-69391-0 / 3030693910
ISBN-13	978-3-030-69391-6 / 9783030693916
Zustand	Neuware