An interdisciplinary work that examines the representation of death in traditional and 'new' media, explores the meaning of assassination and suicide in a post 9/11 context, and grapples with the use of legal and medical tools that affect the quest for a 'good death'.

The current revival of interest in death seeks ultimate authority in the individual self. This is the first book to comprehensively examine this revival and relate it to theories of modernity and postmodernity.

This novel, cross-disciplinary collection explains how dying, death, and grieving have changed in America, for better or worse, since the turn of the millennium. What does dying with dignity mean in a diverse society with rapidly advancing technology, an aging population, and finite resources? In this fascinating collection, scholars from across the nation illuminate the remarkable changes that have taken place in recent years, are now underway, and loom on the horizon as they lead readers on an exploration of the ways Americans think about and handle dying and death. Volume 1, New Paths of Engagement, addresses changes in the circumstances and expressions of death, dying, and grief in 21st-century America. Volume 2, New Venues in the Search for Dignity and Grace, delves into the challenges inherent in creating a medical and social system that allows for an optimal end-of-life experience for all and proposes ways in which society can be reshaped to move toward that ideal.

This novel, cross-disciplinary collection explains how dying, death, and grieving have changed in America, for better or worse, since the turn of the millennium. What does dying with dignity mean in a diverse society with rapidly advancing technology, an aging population, and finite resources? In this fascinating collection, scholars from across the nation illuminate the remarkable changes that have taken place in recent years, are now underway, and loom on the horizon as they lead readers on an exploration of the ways Americans think about and handle dying and death. Volume 1, New Paths of Engagement, addresses changes in the circumstances and expressions of death, dying, and grief in 21st-century America. Volume 2, New Venues in the Search for Dignity and Grace, delves into the challenges inherent in creating a medical and social system that allows for an optimal end-of-life experience for all and proposes ways in which society can be reshaped to move toward that ideal.

Death has been deemed the “great equalizer,” but each journey towards our shared, ultimate fate is unique. The length of our lives, the quality of our last days, how our deaths are perceived by others, and the handling of our remains are governed by nature and many socio-cultural factors. Unequal Before Death is an edited collection that addresses inequalities surrounding death from the perspectives of scholars in a wide range of humanistic and social science disciplines, including art history, anthropology, Film and media studies, political science, popular culture, psychology, religion, sociology, and statistics. The majority of the chapters of this interdisciplinary anthology are revised versions of papers presented at the second Austin H. Kutscher Memorial Conference, entitled “Unequal Before Death,” organized by the Columbia University Seminar on Death in March 2010 and attended by leading experts in academia, healthcare and the not-for-profit sector. The purpose of this volume is to bring attention to the many inequalities affecting the end of life experience and to encourage collaborative research and action that can improve the experience for the dying and those around them. This volume does not question the truism of death as the ultimate equalizer but rather, seeks to explore the many ways in which the final journey is not equal.

Making Sense utilises art practice as a pro-active way of thinking that helps us to make sense of the world. It does this by developing an applied understanding of how we can use art as a method of healing and as a critical method of research. Drawing from poststructuralist philosophy, psychoanalysis, arts therapies, and the creative processes of a range of contemporary artists, the book appeals to the fields of art theory, the arts therapies, aesthetics and art practice, whilst it opens the regenerative affects of art-making to everyone. It does this by proposing the agency of 'transformative therapeutics', which defines how art helps us to make sense of the world, by activating, nourishing and understanding a particular world view or situation therein. The purpose of the book is to question and understand how and why art has this facility and power, and make the creative and healing properties of certain modes of expression widely accessible, practical and useful.

This volume is an introduction to the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature. Jean-Michel Rabaté takes Sigmund Freud as his point of departure, studying in detail Freud's integration of literature in the training of psychoanalysts and how literature provided crucial terms for his myriad theories, such as the Oedipus complex. Rabaté subsequently surveys other theoreticians such as Wilfred Bion, Marie Bonaparte, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek. This Introduction is organized thematically, examining in detail important terms like deferred action, fantasy, hysteria, paranoia, sublimation, the uncanny, trauma, and perversion. Using examples from Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare to Sophie Calle and Yann Martel, Rabaté demonstrates that the psychoanalytic approach to literature, despite its erstwhile controversy, has recently reemerged as a dynamic method of interpretation.

Disrupting commonly held notions about who gets tattooed and why, The Tattoo Project describes, illustrates, and celebrates the social significances of commemorative tattoos. Written by scholars from various disciplines, as well as by community members and practitioners, this edited collection considers the meanings people make from their experiences of love, loss, trauma, resilience, and change, and why they choose to inscribe those meanings on their bodies. This methods-based text also examines the process of building a community-contributed digital archive of tattoo photos and stories, the result of which inspired the contributions to this book. Writing at the intersections between the public and the private, the authors consider the production and mobilization of knowledge across communities, disciplines, and space. Featuring beautiful tattoo photography, personal narratives from project participants, and original poetry by Priscila Uppal, The Tattoo Project is a novel read that bridges the gap between academic and popular audiences. This timely collection is a valuable resource for courses across the social sciences and humanities and for anyone interested in tattoos and their significance.

Experts in end-of-life care tell us that we should talk about death and dying with relatives and friends, but how do we get such conversations off the ground in a society that historically has avoided the topic? This book provides one example of such a conversation. The coauthors take up challenging questions about pain, caregiving, grief, and what comes after death. Their unlikely collaboration is itself connected to death: the murders of two of Irene's closest friends and Steve's support in perpetuating memories of those friends' lives and not just their violent ends. The authors share the results of a no-holds-barred discussion they conducted for several years over email. Readers can consider a range of views on complicated issues to which there are no right answers. Letting ourselves pose certain questions has the potential to profoundly change the way we think about death, how we choose to die, and, just as importantly, the way we live. Honest, probing, sensitive, and even humorous at times, the completely open discussions in this book will help readers deal with a topic that most of us try to avoid but that everyone will face eventually.

From one of Scandinavia's most innovative writers, a shimmering journey into the absurd phenomenality of family life - and the human microbiome Adorable is a haunting, transmundane portrait of a young family told in four parts, in Copenhagen and London. The love between B and Q is tender but worn. When their daughter Æ is born, the everyday lights up in a new way. In its second part, the dead are animated in B's brain. When B's father dies, the news is delivered to her by phone and an essayistic, collagist meditation on death and transmission ensues. And then, it's finally Friday. B and Q descend below the living room floor and wander through a cracked and skittish underworld. In Ida Marie Hede's porous world, which is our world too, grime, bacteria, and even death are intimately bound up with health and renewal. Fusing the commonplace and the profound, the material and the spiritual, the elegiac and the conceptual, Adorable powerfully insists that it is impossible to tell where death and life begin or end. Praise for Adorable Ida Marie Hede's Adorable is this incredible, tiny, undead person you can possess and make mouth subconscious astonishments. The transubstantiation of book to wet undead joy comes from Hede's use of words for feelings and experiences fantastically resistant to representation. In its vivid wrangle, Hede's language blooms into dazzling gratuity by anaphoric increments, as it laps hungrily at death and toddlers and shit and grief and slime and herself. The whole thing glistens and then spontaneously incorporates - Ed Atkins A teeming, fluid book wet with leaking bodies, influences, concerns, memories, moods. Hede's defamiliarising creation brims over with love and broaches our consciousness, making our own world hot and sticky. Viscerally apt reading for the fraught era we find ourselves in: obsessed with contagion and encroachment, yet besotted with connection and touch - Jen Calleja Adorable pulls us between wanting to live and having to die, between child found and parent lost, feeling from inside Hede's brain-womb all that hide and seek within the concaves of living rooms, telephone calls, and other skins. An urgent, brutally tactile novel that grows boundless in the mind, Adorable achieves life - Mara Coson The reality of bodily fluids is so incisive that what first seems shocking becomes part of the narrative arc, the language of a strange other world. Is the setting of the book B's belly or her brain? Only a fool would separate the two in Hede's prose - Full Stop Adorable is the story of B, Q and their daughter Æ -- one that transcends countries, genres, and is drawn with charm and poetry. Hede's analyses are profound and intellectual. She is unafraid to unpick the grotesqueness of humanity, coupling her descriptions with delicate observations on love and family.A fascinating and gripping read - Lunate Adorable is a lovely, creative take on both life and death - strikingly and effectively earthy, but also beautiful in its spun-out fantasies. It impresses particularly in its descriptions of young(est) childhood (and parenthood). The presentation is not straightforward, but there is a coherence to the whole, and certainly sufficient story, too, making for an engaging and stimulating work - Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review IDA MARIE HEDE (b. 1980) is the author of seven books and numerous plays. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of Copenhagen and Goldsmiths College and graduated from the School of Creative Writing in Copenhagen in 2008. Hede has taught at Gladiatorskolen, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and is currently a c