David Kennedy

Continuing social presence of the dead: exploring suicide bereavement through online memorialisation

The last 10 years have seen a rise in Internet sites commemorating those lost to suicide. These sites describe the life of the deceased and the afterlife of relatives, parents, friends or siblings who have been termed the “forgotten bereaved”. It is clear that such sites have implications for continuing bonds and for what many commentators refer to as the continuing social presence of the dead. This paper presents interim findings from ongoing research which focuses on two aspects of suicide memorial websites. First, we explore the extent to which such sites help us understand how the Internet is enabling new ways of grieving and is, in effect, making new cultural scripts. Second, although there is a large body of writing on the management of trauma there is little evidence-based research. The paper draws on face-to-face interviews with owners of suicide memorial sites (family members and friends) and explores how the establishment and maintenance of such a site is an important part of the therapeutic process and how, for grieving relatives, making or contributing to such sites provides ways of managing trauma in the aftermath of a death by suicide.

‘We do it to keep him alive’: bereaved individuals’ experiences of online suicide memorials and continuing bonds

Abstract This paper presents draws on interviews with individuals who have experience of creating, maintaining and utilising Facebook sites in memory of a loved one who has died by suicide. We argue that Facebook enables the deceased to be an on-going active presence in the lives of the bereaved. We highlight the potential of the Internet (and Facebook in particular) as a new and emerging avenue for the continuation of online identities and continuing bonds. Our study offers unique insight into survivors’ experiences of engaging with the virtual presence of their deceased loved one: how mourners come and go online, how this evolves over time and how the online identity of the deceased evolves even after death. We discuss how Facebook provides new ways for people to experience and negotiate death by suicide and to memorialise the deceased, highlighting the positive impact of this for survivors’ mental health. Finally, we describe the creation of tension amongst those who manage their grief in different ways.

‘Beyond trauma’ The uses of the past in twenty-first century Europe

William Gibson’s most recent novel Spook Country (2008) features an artist, Alberto Corales, who uses Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates to produce ‘spatially tagged’, ‘locative’ hypermedia art (Gibson, 2008: 24). One of his pieces is experienced by donning a visor on Sunset Boulevard and seeing a virtual recreation of the 1993 death of Hollywood actor River Phoenix from a drugs overdose outside The Viper Room nightclub (9–10). Corales’s curator Odile Richard, who has been curating this type of art ‘everywhere’ (24), remarks that ‘Alberto is concerned with history as internalized space . . . . He sees this internalized space emerge from trauma. Always, from trauma’ (8). Spook Country continues an interest in trauma narrative that dominated Gibson’s previous novel Pattern Recognition (2004). Here, Cayce Pollard, a ‘‘‘coolhunter’’ . . . a dowser in the world of global marketing’ (Gibson, Pattern Recognition: 2) whose father ‘went missing’ (286) in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, finds herself on the track of a curiously addictive online film known as ‘the footage’. The film turns out to be made by Nora who was injured in a Russian Mafia bomb attack on her family and is looked after by her twin sister Stella. Before the bomb, Nora had had a 16-minute short film shown at Cannes; after the bomb, she edited it down to a single frame: ‘A bird. In flight. Not even in focus. Its wings, against gray cloud’ (288). We also learn that Nora self-harmed after seeing the attack on the World Trade Center. Now, with a single bomb fragment lodged between the lobes of her brain, Nora produces the ‘footage’ from scraps of found video:

The beyond of the subject – mourning, desire and the uncanny

Critics of elegy are in broad agreement about the extent to which the work of mourning involves trying to limit the work of desire. Peter Sacks gives the exemplary statement of this approach in The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats: ‘The movement from loss to consolation. . .requires a deflection of desire’ into tropes both for ‘the lost object and for the original character of the desire itself ’. Reviewing masculine elegy and elegy criticism from a feminist perspective, Melissa F. Zeiger argues that ‘Sacks, and almost all psychoanalytic readers of elegy’ see the genre as comprising ‘heroic male narratives of renunciation’. Desire is, nonetheless, a surplus that demands to be spent. As Kate Lilley argues in a wide-ranging account of figure and narrative in masculine elegy, ‘Expenditure is the goal of elegy, as well as an account of how the elegist spends himself in the service of desire, in the articulation of desire’. The identification of successful mourning with expenditure and of unsuccessful or pathological mourning with the hoarding of desire derives from Freud’s essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. Articulation as spending is the process by which, in Freud’s phrase, ‘respect for reality gains the day’ and ‘the ego becomes free and uninhibited again’. Despite such extensive recognition of the work of desire in elegy, little attention has been paid to elegies in which it is neither possible nor desirable for the elegist’s desire to be deflected, renounced or spent. Indeed, elegy criticism has tended to use ‘desire’ rather uncritically with little reference to the detailed theorising of the concept that took place from a predominantly Lacanian perspective in the last quarter of the last century. At the same time, elegy criticism has paid little attention to the uncanny. This may well be because the presence of corpses, ghosts and revenants are expected and accepted components of the scene of elegy. Critics have perhaps shared Freud’s queasiness about this aspect of the uncanny. Freud observes that ‘To many people the acme of the uncanny is represented by anything to do with death, dead bodies, revenants, Textual Practice 23(4), 2009, 581–598

Introduction: Seamus Heaney’s Europe

Seamus Heaney’s Europe is a space of contradictions. On the one hand, there is his belief in the principle of the national and ethnic identity understood in essentialist terms. On the other hand, there is a vision of the European tradition as multi-layered and devoid of clear outlines and a stable centre. The two moments inform Heaney’s work and are examined in the context of literary fascinations and interdependencies.

‘Representable justice’: Returning the dead and policing the city in some Victorian and contemporary elegies

Abstract Elegys roots in pastoral are widely-known but little critical attention has been given to the city in elegy. This is surprising since pastoral involves not only a dialectical relation between the city and the country but also, as Terry Gifford observes, ‘some form of retreat and return … in the sense that the pastoral retreat [returns] some insights relevant to the urban audience.’ Elegy is also concerned with the concept of ‘return’: the literal return of the dead to the city. This return not only enacts what Gillian Rose calls ‘representable justice’ but also enables the dead to have a continuing use that guarantees the continuation of the city. This essay examines how some nineteenth and twentieth century elegies explore and enact ideas of representable justice and of the deads continuing value through either careful policing or contestation of the citys laws and borders.

Here Is/Where There/Is: Some Observations of Spatial Deixis in Robert Creeley's Poetry

Multiple uses of the spatial deictic “here” are a notable feature of Robert Creeleys poetry. For example, the Collected Poems 1945–1975 contains five poems called “Here” and two called “Here Again,” and after only a hundred pages one has encountered at least eight uses of “here.” Similarly, Charles Altieri has noted a movement in Creeleys poetry from saying “there” to being able to say “here” as a statement of “an ideal of pure presence, of a relationship between subject and world where each is transparent to and completely adequate for the other.” In this essay, I will examine examples of Creeleys “heres” in the early poetry, up to and including Words (1967) and Pieces (1969). I will argue that while some of Creeleys uses of “here” do involve problems of location and ideal presence, other uses speak to problems of agency, form and the body. I will go on to argue that, ultimately, Creeleys “heres” map a search for location that discovers each new articulation is a disorientating reorientation. This reading of Creeleys use of “here” will be informed by a number of other sources including Jonathan Cullers pioneering work on deixis in Structuralist Poetics ; J. P. Dennys comparative work on spatial adverbs in English, Eskimo and Kikuyu; Heideggers discussion of “here” and “yonder”; and the paintings of Barnett Newman which are notable for their deictic titles. Reading these with and back into Creeleys poetry enables a greater understanding of how spatial deixis works in lyric poetry and how it relates to Creeleys reflexive lyric.

“I,” “You,” “Mine”: Subject and Quotation in Eléna Rivera's Mistakes, Accidents, and a Want of Liberty

In the introduction to Quid 11: Three U.S. Poets (November 2002), Keston Sutherland wrote, “One considerable and vital task now facing U.S. poets … might be a confrontation with abstraction per se .” In the context of political poetry, this speaks to two important questions: first, how the individual is to be portrayed as a political subject by the avant-garde; second, what is the role of form in that portrayal? This essay will explore these questions through a detailed reading of Elena Riveras sequence Mistakes, Accidents, and a Want of Liberty (Barque Press, 2006). At first sight, Mistakes reads as a coded series of meditations in an associative order which give the reader the feeling of being abandoned into the text. However, Googling the opening poems title, “thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty”, takes the reader straight to the nineteenth-century autobiography of slavery, escape and freedom The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). This connects Riveras sequence and the reader with one of the moments when a new type of individual-as-political-subject enters literature. An important part of Frederick Douglasss story involves learning to read and write at a time when slaves were forbidden to do so. In this context, Rivera is opening an argument about how the political subject is constructed and portrayed in language. We will argue, then, that through its intertextual relationship with The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and with other texts such as King Lear , Riveras sequence offers revitalizing strategies not only for portraying the subject but for writing and reading politically. In this way, Mistakes, Accidents, and a Want of Liberty suggests ways of thinking, writing and reading outside what one poem calls “The limits … of ‘you’ as reflection, of ‘you’ as reaction”.

‘Now’, ‘now’, ‘even now’: temporal deixis and the crisis of the present in some Northern Irish poems of the Troubles

The problem of how to describe and account for the present can be identified as a particular preoccupation of poets of the so-called Northern Irish renaissance. This article examines how the temporal deictic ‘now’ functions in some well-known poems by Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. All three poets explore how to combine the plausibility of lyric derived from an individual consciousness with the authority of narrative derived from social interactions. This article will do three related things. First, it will argue that discussing ‘now’ as a temporal deictic enables us to appreciate the full ambiguity and complexity of some poems written at the height of the Northern Irish Troubles. Second, the article will argue that these poems reveal that ‘now’ actually functions in poetry more complexly than some theorists of deixis have allowed. Finally, the article will suggest newly fruitful ways of combining literary stylistics with more conventional close reading.