Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust. By JENNIFER RUSHWORTH. (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 201 pp

Abstract

Jennifer Rushworth's imaginative journey through 'a few diverse melancholic moments in the history of literature'; (p.5) reconfirms the illuminating value of comparative encounters among authors and texts from very different times and places. The lucidly written Introduction guides us through key definitions, like the titular Barthesian 'discourses', indicating both an exploratory 'movement between theories and texts' and the fertile 'creation of pluri-linguistic textual dialogues' (p.2). The theoretical discussion of mourning begins with Freud's early differentiation between melancholia - 'endless and pathological' - and the 'work of mourning' - a healthier 'finite experience' (p.5), resulting in the replacement of the love object. Kristeva agrees on the need for acceptance of loss, but nuances this condemnation of melancholia, proposing that its language can be a source of creativity. Critical of the Freudian model, Derrida rejects the unethical value of forgetfulness and proposes, instead,'demi-deuil' as a way of 'perpetuating, intermittently, one's relationship to the lost love object'(p.8).