"How do the living maintain relations to the dead? Why do we bury
people when they die? And what is at stake when we do? In The
Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison considers the supreme
importance of these questions to Western civilization, exploring the
many places where the dead cohabit the world of the living - the
graves, images, literature, architecture, and monuments that house
the dead in their afterlife among us.".
"This work devotes particular attention to the practice of burial.
Harrison contends that we bury our dead to humanize the lands where
we build our present and imagine our future. As long as the dead are
interred in graves and tombs, they never truly depart from this world
but remain, if only symbolically, among the living.
Spanning a broad range of examples, from the graves of our first
human ancestors to the empty tomb of the Gospels to the Vietman
Veterans Memorial, Harrison considers the authority of predecessors
in both modern and premodern societies.
Through inspired readings of major writers and thinkers such as Vico,
Virgil, Dante, Pater, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Rilke, he argues that
the buried dead form an essential foundation where future generations
can retrieve their past, while burial grounds provide an important
bedrock where past generations can preserve their legacy for the
unborn." "The Dominion of the Dead is a meditation on how the thought
of death shapes the communion of the living."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (p. 161-198) and index.
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