GNED 1201: Death in Literature - Relationships with the Dead and Literary Madness

Healthy Relationships with the Dead

Connections maintained through visiting tombstones, Remembrance Day, Day of the Dead, photographs, memories, songs, and memorial statues.

Unhealthy Relationships with the Dead

Connections that manifest in literature through hauntings, madness, and obsession, resulting in a distortion of and interference with reality.

Imaginal relationships

Continuous relationships with the dead characterized by reciprocity, where characters treat the connection as an ongoing, unchanging relationship.

Parasocial relationships

One-sided relationships constructed in a character's head rather than the real world, such as a castaway talking to a volleyball; often symbolic of loss.

Literary madness

A state that usually emerges in extreme circumstances like grief and reflects a human denial of death, providing insight into the self.

Edgar Allan Poe

A Boston-born writer ($1809$) famous for cultivating mystery and the macabre, and credited with inspiring modern detective stories.

Gothic stories

Literature often cast as confessions of madmen or criminals, frequently utilizing deranged murderers as unreliable narrators.

The Eye (The Tell-Tale Heart)

A symbol reduced to a "vulture" or "evil eye" by the narrator, representing death and the loss of the old man's humanity.

The Heart (The Tell-Tale Heart)

A symbol that represents paranoia and madness rather than love or life within the context of Poe's story.

Destructive temporality

A concept created by the combination of the heart's rhythm, the death-watches in the wall, and the ticking of a clock.

Melancholic madness

A result of knowing whom you have lost but not what you have lost within yourself, as explored in ‘The Raven’.

Haunting

The ‘unexpected presence of absence’ or the ability of unseen forces to make themselves felt in everyday life, often disrupting the sense of time and self.

Unheimlich (uncanny)

A term meaning ‘not from the home,’ referring to something sinister hidden in the home that turns the familiar into the unfamiliar.

Shirley Jackson

The American author ($1916$) of ‘The Lottery’ and ‘The Haunting of Hill House,’ the latter being considered one of the best ghost stories ever written.

Spiritualist movement

A movement beginning in $1848$ with Kate and Maggie Fox that allowed women to display social independence through the s