Good Deaths in Wendell Berry's Short Stories
This article looks at how Wendell Berry's short stories depicting good deaths offer a crucial exploration of the incarnate bonds of human affection. They do so, I argue, by pointing us to the vulnerable ordinariness of embodied love. I first describe these good deaths as "ordinary" be...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
2021
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| In: |
Literature and theology
Year: 2021, Volume: 35, Issue: 2, Pages: 151-177 |
| IxTheo Classification: | CD Christianity and Culture KAJ Church history 1914-; recent history KBQ North America NBE Anthropology |
| Further subjects: | B
Affection
B Wendell Berry B Poison B death and dying B The Ordinary |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This article looks at how Wendell Berry's short stories depicting good deaths offer a crucial exploration of the incarnate bonds of human affection. They do so, I argue, by pointing us to the vulnerable ordinariness of embodied love. I first describe these good deaths as "ordinary" because of the way that they refuse a heroic mode of standing above the world and instead accept and live into the vulnerable connections that mark our materiality. I show also how this acceptance, and not any attempt to transcend the ordinary, is what opens these deaths up to the sacred, which I argue is a mark of belonging in love to the world and the love that moves the world. In the second section, I outline the relational role death plays in inaugurating and sustaining the gift-giving relational bonds that make up the life of affection in a place, such that there is a sense in which it is death that opens us up to love, even as death always marks an absence. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4623 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Literature and theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/litthe/frab006 |