The Politics of Mourning in C. S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed

• Main Authors: JUANG, YAN-JUNG, 莊喭中
• Other Authors: CHU, WEN-CHUAN
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/czpr8f

碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 107 === C. S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, as a memoir, documents his personal reflections upon the formidable mourning and unbearable grief for the death of his wife, Helen. Lewis’ memoir, in its entirety, is no less an epitome of human conditions than an imaginative confession and peregrination of his own mourning as life politics. Focusing upon the phenomenon of mourning, the overarching purpose of the thesis is to explore human conditions as an imaginative state within the politics of mourning. This thesis is divided into three sections, firstly discussing the ethical impasse of mourning with Derridean approach to the politics of mourning. In Derrida’s discourse, the successful mourning fails and the failure to mourn succeeds, revealing that the possibility of a mourners’ relief from mourning consists in one’s imagination that is unfaithful and self-deceiving. In Section Two, with Bachelardian poetics of space, the thesis aims to demonstrate how Lewis as a mourner projects his own mourning unto his mourning space in his own psychogeography, thus making him chase after the past and the dead in the spacious grief. Section Three questions the extent to which a mourner imagines an imago to essay atonement for human beings’ helpless despair and compromising acquiescence in predestined mourning as an inevitable wound. With mourning, psychogeography, wounds and imagoes at issue, this thesis suggests since life is a genealogy of predestined loss and wounds, then to survive mourning over loss and wounds in life politics lies nowhere but in the texture of an imagined imago that is the essence of life itself.