Lost Bodies

"If the dying body makes us flinch and look away, struggling not to see what we have seen, the lost body disappears from cultural view, buried along with the sensory traces of its corporeal presence."—from the IntroductionAmerican popular culture conducts a passionate love affair with the healthy, fit, preferably beautiful body, and in recent years theories of embodiment have assumed importance in various scholarly disciplines. But what of the dying or dead body? Why do we avert our gaze, speak of it only as absence? This thoughtful and beautifully written book—illustrated with photographs by Shellburne Thurber and other remarkable images—finds a place for the dying and lost body in the material, intellectual, and imaginary spaces of contemporary American culture.Laura E. Tanner focuses her keen attention on photographs of AIDS patients and abandoned living spaces; newspaper accounts of September 11; literary works by Don DeLillo, Donald Hall, Sharon Olds, Marilynne Robinson, and others; and material objects, including the AIDS Quilt. She analyzes the way in which these representations of the body reflect current cultural assumptions, revealing how Americans read, imagine, and view the dynamics of illness and loss. The disavowal of bodily dimensions of death and grief, she asserts, deepens rather than mitigates the isolation of the dying and the bereaved. Lost Bodies will speak to anyone imperiled by the threat of loss.

"In Lost Bodies, Laura Tanner suggestively and elegantly draws together the theoretical co-implications of consumer agency and the body, feminist and phenomenological concepts of intercorporeality, Freudian and Lacanian taxonomies of mourning, as well as visual analysis to investigate confrontations with corporeal vulnerability and loss in a variety of contemporary narratives. Tanner sustains these theoretical and interpretative juxtapositions with equally compelling insight and sensitivity.", "Lost Bodies offers an engaging and imaginative exploration of death, dying, and grief through original readings of a rich array of contemporary texts: poetry, fiction, photography, and even textiles. Laura Tanner makes the issue of loss in our contemporary culture vivid and compelling. Marked by inventive critical frameworks, interdisciplinary range, and a touch of personal reflection, Tanner's book is clearly informed, well shaped, and disciplined by her central concern with the relationships among grief, the process of dying, and the legacy of the lost body.", "We shy away from our mortality and we shine off loss with hopeful platitudes. In Lost Bodies, Laura Tanner studies the dance between the living and the dead finding new appreciation for the physical. She parses the nuances of the knower, the known and the way of knowing bodies in transition. By bringing the subconscious body to the conscious level she expands the bounds of our language and challenges traditional constraints. If you want to be more real and more intimate, get visceral."

Laura E. Tanner is Associate Professor of English at Boston College. She is the author of Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture in Twentieth-Century Fiction.