Beatrice Martina Guenther - Böcker

Discusses literary representations of death to explore the relation between writing and death—death understood as both the death of the individual and the death of meaning.Traditionally, the act of writing constitutes a challenge to the finality of death. Yet "writing" as a subject for literary texts has its own tradition of imagery whose rhetoric is associated with loss rather than immortality. The limit of death seems to force a more explicit analysis of the process of writing. Writers consider the impact of their work on their readers, or re-articulate the link between the written text and the subject it is meant to represent. Each writer constructs a "subversive" text. The conjunction of writing and death-besides highlighting or demystifying the creative act-leads in each case to a decidedly critical stance. Guenther examines how Kleist's and Balzac's representations of death bring with them a critical awareness that calls attention to the historical context in which the texts are produced.