Overview
Provides a cultural studies perspective on a fundamental human question
Includes contributions by renowned scholars and experts in their fields
Analyses how death and the Beyond find contemporary expressions in different cultures
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (12 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Initial Questions
-
Front Matter
-
-
Questions of Visuality
-
Front Matter
-
Keywords
- cycles of death and rebirth
- death anxiety
- posthumanism
- biological immortality
- science fiction and afterlife
- afterlife in Indian visual culture
- images of Hell in European literature
- spiritualism and occultism in modernity
- near-death experiences
- cultures of suicide
- Varanasi and the city of death
- death rituals
About this book
The chapters cover a wide spectrum of disciplinary approaches, from psychoanalysis to religious, anthropological, literary and film studies, from sociology and philosophy to art history, and address issues of unsettling power: comforting illusions of afterlife; the relations between afterlife and fertility; visions of technological immortalization of mankind; the problem of thinking about death after the “death of God”; socialist utopias of bodily immortality; fear of Hell and punishment; different concepts in relating the living and the dead; near-death experiences; and cultural practices of spiritualism, occultism and suicide.
Reviews
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Günter Blamberger holds a Chair in German Philology at the University of Cologne and is Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities (Internationales Kolleg Morphomata) in Cologne. Since 1996 he has been President of the International Kleist-Society, and editor of the Kleist-Yearbook. He was responsible for the Kleist-Bicentenary in 2011. His biography on Heinrich von Kleist (Fischer, 2011) received an award as Germany’s best non-fiction book in 2011 and will be published in English in 2018. He is a member of the German Academy of Language and Literature. His main areas of research include German and European literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, moralistic philosophy, interdisciplinary and cross-cultural studies on creativity, contemporary German literature and film, figurations of melancholy, figurations of death. His recently published books are On Creativity, Ed. (Penguin Press, 2015), Sind alle Denker traurig? Ed. (Fink, 2015), Venus as Muse, Ed. (Brill/Rodopi, 2015), Auf schwankendem Grund. Dekadenz und Tod im Venedig der Moderne, Ed. (Fink, 2014), Figuring Death, Figuring Creativity: On the Power of Aesthetic Ideas (Fink, 2013), Peter Esterházy, Ed. (Fink, 2013), Möglichkeitsdenken, Ed. (Fink, 2013), Ökonomie des Opfers. Literatur im Zeichen des Suizids, Ed. (Fink, 2013), Daniel Kehlmann, Ed. (Fink, 2012)..
Sudhir Kakar, psychoanalyst and writer, has been Lecturer at Harvard University, Research Fellow at Harvard Business School, Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and Head of Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He has been a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Study of World Religions at Harvard as also Visiting Professor at the universities of Chicago, Harvard, McGill, Melbourne, Hawai’i, Vienna; a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin and Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Cologne. Kakar's many honours include the Kardiner Award of Columbia University, Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, Germany’s Goethe Medal, Rockefeller Residency, McArthur Fellowship, Distinguished Service Award of Indo-American Psychiatric Association, Fellow of the National Academy of Psychology, Merck Tagore Award, the Bhabha, Nehru and Indian Council of Social Science Research National Fellowships in India and Germany’s Order of Merit. His latest books are Young Tagore: The Makings of a Genius and the novel The Devil Take Love.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Imaginations of Death and the Beyond in India and Europe
Editors: Günter Blamberger, Sudhir Kakar
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6707-5
Publisher: Springer Singapore
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-10-6706-8Published: 13 April 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-981-13-3892-2Published: 20 December 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-981-10-6707-5Published: 27 March 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XX, 202
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations, 20 illustrations in colour
Topics: Cultural Anthropology, Religion and Psychology, Comparative Religion