Imaginations of death and beyond in India and Europe

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Material type: Text

TextPublication details: Springer Nature 2018 SingaporeDescription: xx, 202 p.: col. ill. Includes bibliographical referencesISBN:

9789811338922

Subject(s):

DDC classification:

291.23 I6

Summary: This volume explores current images of afterlife/afterdeath and the presence of the dead in the imaginations of the living in Indian and European traditions. Specifically, it focuses on the deepest and most fundamental uncertainty of human existence---the awareness of human mortality, on which depends any assignment of meaning to earthly existence as also to notions of worldly and otherworldly salvation. This central idea is addressed in the literature, arts, audiovisual media and other cultural artefacts of the two traditions. The chapters are based on two main assumptions: First, that one cannot report on the direct experience of death; so it is only possible to speak allegorically of it. Second, in contemporary Western societies, marked by structural atheism, people look at literature, the arts and mass media to study their depiction and reading of traditionally religious questions of disease, death and the Beyond. This is in contrast to Asian civilizations whose preoccupation with death and Beyond is persistent and perhaps central to the civilizations’ highest thought. 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. https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811067068

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Item type	Current library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Book	Ahmedabad General Stacks	Non-fiction	291.23 I6 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Available		203088

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Table of content

Part I Initial Questions
1. Moksha: On the Hindu Quest for Immortality
Sudhir Kakar
2. Threshold-Images between Life and Death in Western Literature and Film
Günter Blamberger
Part II Questions of Immortality
3. Illusions of Immortality
Jonardon Ganeri
4. The quest for immortality as a technical problem. The idea of Cybergnosis and the visions of posthumanism
Oliver Krüger
5. From biological to moral immortality: The Utopian Dimensions of Socialist Work Ethics
Anja Kirsch
Part III Questions of Visuality
6. The Dead, Dying, and Post-death: Visual Exemplars and Iconographic Devices
Naman P. Ahuja
7. Dream, Death and Death within a Dream
Arindam Chakrabarti
8. The Afterworld as a Site of Punishment: Imagining Hell in European Literature and Art
Friedrich Vollhardt
9. The Afterlife of the Dead in this World: Ghosts, Art, and Poetry in German Modernism
Georg Braungart
Part IV Questions of Transition
10. “Death-x-pulse”: A Hermeneutics for Near-Death-Experiences
Jens Schlieter
11. Paths to Nirvana? Hunger as Practice of Suicide
Thomas Macho
12. Afterlife and Fertility in Varanasi
Katharina Kakar

This volume explores current images of afterlife/afterdeath and the presence of the dead in the imaginations of the living in Indian and European traditions. Specifically, it focuses on the deepest and most fundamental uncertainty of human existence---the awareness of human mortality, on which depends any assignment of meaning to earthly existence as also to notions of worldly and otherworldly salvation. This central idea is addressed in the literature, arts, audiovisual media and other cultural artefacts of the two traditions. The chapters are based on two main assumptions: First, that one cannot report on the direct experience of death; so it is only possible to speak allegorically of it. Second, in contemporary Western societies, marked by structural atheism, people look at literature, the arts and mass media to study their depiction and reading of traditionally religious questions of disease, death and the Beyond. This is in contrast to Asian civilizations whose preoccupation with death and Beyond is persistent and perhaps central to the civilizations’ highest thought.
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.

https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811067068

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