AustLit

'According to Sandra Gilbert, one of the contemporary elegy’s most striking features is its obsession with the actual scene of dying and the actual body of the dead one. Gilbert interprets this obsession as an exponent of the modern elegy’s typical ambition of breaking the tenacious taboo on dying and grieving—an ambition that had been demonstrated earlier by Jahan Ramazani’s pioneering Poetry of Mourning. By explicitly showing ill, dying, or dead bodies, Gilbert contends, recent elegies confront us with what modern culture prefers to hide.

'Concentrating on representations of the body in Intensive Care (2010) by the Dutch poet Vrouwkje Tuinman and Undying (2016) by the Scottish-Dutch writer Michel Faber, the present article seeks to complicate dominant interpretations of the function of the corpse in recent poetry. Although Tuinman and Faber do show dying and dead bodies with meticulous attention, they also subtly open up reflections on the mimesis of illness and death. By alternately watching and veiling the body, approaching it as an abject object and an aesthetic artifact, Tuinman and Faber both challenge and confirm the problematic and ambiguous status of the corpse in the contemporary West.' (Publication abstract)