Comparatism and (auto)thanatography : death and mourning in Blanchot, Derrida, and Tim Parks

Abstract

Despite the latitude for diverse interpretation which it allows, the arresting neologism that cues this collection, autobiograftctions, appears to quite specifically envisage writing having to do with life, not death. It is therefore with some awkwardness that I say that this paper will be more about death than life. To speak, as I propose to do, about thanatography - which the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines as 'an account of a person's death' and which counters biography's vitality by being a writing about death or by being, seemingly impossibly, a writing from death - hardly seems very apt. Worse, it is probably morbid. My sense of awkwardness, I must say, deepens.