Assistant Professor of English Dana Luciano has been named a Visiting Faculty Fellow for fall 2003 at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. She will be in residence at the Tanner Center working on her manuscript, "Revisions of Mourning: Loss, Nationality, and the Longing for Form in Nineteenth-Century America," and related projects focusing on public grief and memorial.
Revisions of Mourning discusses the way that mourning has been used to imagine new forms of national and cultural belonging. The study begins by questioning the conceptual framework for most historical/cultural studies of death in America: the belief that we have increasingly repressed or distanced ourselves from the reality of death. What underlies this apparent "loss" of death, Luciano argues, is the conversion, in the nineteenth century, of death into a mode of production. Luciano traces the development of a cultural framework for managing morbidity, which results in the projection of deathliness onto certain "species types," or categories whose marginalized social location was rationalized by biology — Native and African Americans, (white) women, children, and sexual dissidents. The book considers how these types became morbidly marked-- how they came, in a sense, to bear the burden of death in America-- how their own expressions of mourning can be seen to respond to that typing, and what kinds of new social and cultural forms were envisioned in and through this kind of minor or dissonant mourning.
The book's analyses of nineteenth century mourning practices chart a path that avoids both the tendency to dismiss mourning practices as mere sentimentality and the populist response that simply celebrates them as authentic expressions of "real feeling." The book consists of five chapters examining a number of telling conjunctions around the question of revisionary mourning. The chapters consider the way that tensions around white identity formation and representation are played out through fantasies about the function of the Native American voice in mourning rituals in novels by James Fenimore Cooper and Catherine Maria Sedgwick; how ambivalence about the figure of the lost mother shapes the nineteenth century domestic-sentimental novel; how dissident writers like Herman Melville develop what Luciano calls post-sentimental forms of mourning, using the temporal lag produced by grief to produce different visions of history; how mourning gets enshrined as an American national tradition differentially available on the basis of race, and what part mourning plays in post-bellum literary representations of the "inexpressible" history of slavery.
