UNIVERSITY OF WINCHESTER Present and Accounted For: Making Sense of Death and the Dead in Late Postmodern Culture Bethan Phyllis Michael-Fox ORCID: 0000-0002-9617-2565 Doctor of Philosophy September 2019 This thesis has been completed as a requirement for a postgraduate research degree of the University of Winchester. DECLARATION AND COPYRIGHT STATEMENT No portion of the work referred to in the Thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning. I confirm that this Thesis is entirely my own work. I confirm that no work previously submitted for credit has been reused verbatim. Any previously submitted work has been revised, developed and recontextualised relevant to the thesis. I confirm that no material of this thesis has been published in advance of its submission. I confirm that no third party proof-reading or editing has been used in this thesis. 1 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Professor Alec Charles for his steadfast support and consistent interest in and enthusiasm for my research. I would also like to thank him for being so supportive of my taking maternity leave and for letting me follow him to different institutions. I would like to thank Professor Marcus Leaning for his guidance and the time he has dedicated to me since I have been registered at the University of Winchester. I would also like to thank the University of Winchester’s postgraduate research team and in particular Helen Jones for supporting my transfer process, registration and studies. 2 UNIVERSITY OF WINCHESTER ABSTRACT Present and Accounted For: Making Sense of Death and the Dead in Late Postmodern Culture Bethan Phyllis Michael-Fox ORCID: 0000-0002-9617-2565 Doctor of Philosophy September 2019 This thesis examines engagement with death and the dead in what is defined here as late postmodern culture. It is argued that late postmodern culture offers a hospitable environment for death and the dead, in large part due to the confluence of postmodern impulses to include voices from the margins with capitalism’s exhaustive inclusion of everything into the market. The thesis is situated as a contribution to the field of death studies. It adopts an interdisciplinary humanities approach, drawing on a range of theory and in particular theory associated with postmodernism and deconstruction. It is argued that death studies as an academic formation can benefit from a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, including those aligned with the humanities. The phrase ‘making sense’ is utilised to denote a process of meaning making that is always active and ongoing. The ways in which death and the dead are ‘made sense’ of in a range of examples including theory, autobiography, artwork, popular discourses and television are explored. The thesis defines late postmodern culture and examines the treatment and positioning of death and the dead within it. It goes on to argue that the self has taken on a particular primacy in the current moment, with significant consequences in terms of death and the dead. Autobiographical engagement with death and the dead by Julian Barnes, Jenny Diski and Will Self are examined in light of the notion of autothanatography before the resurrection of the dead in visual media is explored, with a particular focus on three television series: Les Revenants, In The Flesh and The Fades. It is argued that death and the dead are central to late postmodern culture and present in a wide range of cultural production within it, and that a particular emphasis on the responsibility and accountability of the living toward the dead is beginning to emerge. Keywords: Death Studies, Death, Dead, Interdisciplinary, Postmodernism. 3 Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..5 Chapter One: Late Postmodern Culture.………………………………………………………………..36 Chapter Two: The Presence of Death and the Dead in Late Postmodern Culture.……….73 Chapter Three: An Account of the ‘Death of the Self’…………………………………………………113 Chapter Four: Writing Death and the Self in Late Postmodern Culture……………………….145 Chapter Five: Resurrecting the Dead in Late Postmodern Culture………………………………183 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………228 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………………251 4 Introduction With every death, a world disappears. Zygmunt Bauman reflecting on the work of Jacques Derrida1 In 2017 the journal Cultural Studies published an article formed of a conversation between the author James Marriott and the late Doreen Massey, titled ‘just because you are dead, doesn’t mean you haven’t got opinions.’2 The article acknowledges that engagement between the living and the dead is nothing new, citing an anecdote about Hannah Arendt’s close friendship with Rahel Varnhagen who had been dead for over a century when they met. From quite a different cultural coordinate, in 2018 Teen Vogue featured a brief article seeking to normalise talking to dead loved ones, reassuring its readers this constitutes a healthy approach to grief.3 Elsewhere Kendrick Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) included a conversation between him and Tupac Shakur.4 The two never had the opportunity to speak when Shakur was alive, but using audio from shortly before Shakur’s death in 1996, Lamar engages in a dialogue. This thesis examines an impulse to engage with both death and the dead identifiable in a range of recent literary and visual texts, in theory and more broadly in what is defined here as late postmodern culture. It argues that this engagement is a central tenet of the contemporary zeitgeist, posing a challenge to the death denial thesis and to what Ruth Penfold-Mounce has described as “that dreadful public wisdom that death is taboo.”5 Due to the confluence of capitalism and postmodernism in their late stages, late postmodern culture has become a hospitable environment for the dead. Taking an interdisciplinary, humanities approach, the thesis is situated in the field of death studies. It draws on literary, cultural and critical theory, in particular postmodernist and deconstructionist approaches, to examine the presence of death and the accountability of the living toward the dead in a broad range of recent cultural texts. 1 Zygmunt Bauman interviewed by Michael Hviid Jacobsen, "Sociology, mortality and solidarity: an interview with Zygmunt Bauman on death, dying and immortality,” Mortality 16.4 (2011): 388, doi: 10.1080/13576275.2011.614445 2 James Marriott, “‘Just because you are dead, doesn’t mean you haven’t got opinions’: a conversation with Doreen Massey,” Cultural Studies (2017), doi: 10.1080/09502386.2017.1354051 3 Danielle Corcione, “For Those in Grief, Talking to a Dead Loved One is Good for Mental Health: And it’s totally normal,” Teen Vogue, August 30, 2018, accessed June 21, 2020, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/grief- talking-to-a-dead-loved-one-is-good-for-mental-health 4 Kendrick Lamar, “Mortal Man,” To Pimp a Butterfly, MP3, Aftermath, Interscope, Top Dawg, 2015. 5 Ruth Penfold-Mounce and Julie Rugg, “How does culture understand death?,” Emerald Publishing (2018), accessed February 21, 2019, https://soundcloud.com/user-163454702-828217667/how-does-culture- understand-death 5 Caring for death studies In some ways, situating this thesis in the field of death studies is impossible. As this introduction considers, academic fields and disciplines operate within and are shaped by institutional structures. Having studied at a number of universities, ‘death studies’ has not been an option on the registration drop-down menu at any of them. As Susan Dobscha has pointed out, though people have “been writing about death since the first writers took pen to parchment,” death has until recently been a focus “noticeably absent in academic enquiry.”6 Yet, this thesis has been developed and cultivated through engagement with death studies research and infrastructures. Initially proposed as interdisciplinary, drawing primarily on literary, cultural and critical theory, in the early stages of the research the field of death studies came into view. It was through death studies conferences, networks and journals that it became possible to advance the different understandings presented here. Ted Striphas, in taking over as editor of the academic journal Cultural Studies, set out an approach to caring for cultural studies. He felt this to be necessary in the face of its “waning” as a “scholarly formation,” its “shrinking institutional footprint,” its need to contend with a reduction in publishers or book series dedicated to it, and the presence of a “host of intellectual fellow travelers” such as actor network theory that seemed to be absorbing “some of the controversy, charisma, and authority” of cultural studies.7 Though death studies seems to be a growing formation rather than a waning one, with new book series, networks and conferences emerging, Striphas’s guidance on caring for cultural studies can aid an understanding of the ways in which disciplinary infrastructures support the development of both a field of study and the work that emerges within it. He draws attention to the importance of “infrastructurists,” people “both past and present, working in all parts of the globe” who have built programmes and centres, journals and book series, courses and curriculum, conferences […] any number of other nodes and networks that are no less Cultural Studies than its body of ideas. Indeed, that body of ideas is nothing without a framework