RT Article
T1 Good Deaths in Wendell Berry's Short Stories
JF Literature and theology
VO 35
IS 2
SP 151
OP 177
A1 Enscoe, Gerald Eugene
LA English
YR 2021
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1782568417
AB 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.
K1 Wendell Berry
K1 death and dying
K1 Affection
K1 The Ordinary
K1 Gift
DO 10.1093/litthe/frab006