This essay explores the role of everyday objects in life writing, using the example of a collection of buttons. Writing as bricoleur, and influenced by thing theory, I follow a digressive path and wonder how key aspects of life writing, such as memory, the body, and identity, are influenced when one writes from and with objects.

This article examines the historical fragments of cemetery records and monumental masonry for the poet and journalist Laman Blanchard, who was interred in West Norwood Cemetery, London, in 1845, and whose monument was cleared a century later by Lambeth Council. It focuses on Blanchard’s role in the Dickens literary circle and his relation to mid-Victorian writers, situating his untimely death in light of changing legislation on suicide. His lost grave marker is recovered by scrutinising his burial record, obituary, epitaph, and periodicals to ferret out connections amongst the archival sources of his death. The nebulous association, between what is written-by a person in life and what is written-about that person after death, is contemplated throughout.

This article considers Thomas Gray’s use of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura in his prolific period of writing following Richard West’s death. Gray claims himself as ‘Master Tommy Lucretius’ in reference to his Latin philosophical poem, De Principiis Cogitandi; this self-presentation as a Lucretian poet continues through his English poetry concerning West’s death. Gray’s reference to conversing with the dead in a letter to West suggests that Gray’s poetry concerning West can be considered a form of posthumous life writing in two specific senses: one as a continued memorializing West’s life by Gray, and the other as a concurrent chronicling of Gray’s grief. They reach their culmination when Gray puts his questioning of poetry as a form of memorial into action when using Lucretius’ biography, and its associations with suicide, as a model of the suicidal poetic narrator in his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. The Elegy marks an end to Gray’s use of Lucretius and De Rerum Natura to question the living’s responsibility for continuing a posthumous memorial of the dead after West’s death.

Fragmentation, dissection, explosion: how to characterize the most influentially innovative art—be it theatre, music, literature or painting—of the twentieth century’s first half depends on which artistic formation one has in view and how violent or deliberate one takes that formation to have been. Regardless, a splitting open, dismantling or weakening of the bonds between its constituent parts marked that moment’s culture, with Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso as two of that disintegrative impulse’s most influential proponents. Such history might well lead a reader to anticipate scintillating exchanges, crackling with imagination, throughout this collection.

Thingiverse is an open-source website, showcasing the capabilities of 3D printers (https://www.thingiverse.com/). Hosted by Makerbot Industries, one of the largest manufacturers of 3D printers, the site encourages users to share designs under a Creative Commons license. In excess of one million designs have been uploaded to date, ranging from the practical to the frivolous. Blueprints for customisable prosthetic limbs are shared alongside cup-holders and mischievous re-workings of well known cartoon characters. The site is structured like a fairly standard online community, with professional curators and peer-to-peer comment, with no restrictions on use beyond what is legal.

This article discusses public (and semi-public) reactions to death events attracting media and social media attention, described here as spectacular death sharing online. Based on the empirical study of sample cases—predominantly involving the death of white, often young, adults—I show how different kinds of spectacular death events are shared as small stories. I explore the key types of death selected for sharing online, the linguistic and narrative styling of these selections and the networked uptake of the shared stories of life and death. Addressing sharing practices of life and death at these different levels arguably allows an insight into the way the tellability of death is extended in digital time-spaces and its implications for the visibility of death, dying, and mourning. Sharing life and death as small stories of the moment is found to involve practices of death-writing of the moment, which are intimately connected to salient forms of broadcasting the self-online as life-writing of the moment (Georgakopoulou 2017). This mode of sharing offers a window to broader tensions arising from public displays of emotion and the changing—and often antagonistic—forms of testimony in contemporary networked societies.

A Festschrift for Philippe Lejeune

Introduction

Book Review

Book Review