Description
Book SynopsisTo be or not to be - who asks this question today, and how? What does it mean to issue, or respond to, an appeal for the right to die? In A Death of One's Own, the first sustained literary study of the right to die, Jared Stark takes up these timely questions by testing predominant legal understandings of assisted suicide and euthanasia against literary reflections on modern death.
Trade ReviewThis is a beautifully crafted work that traces a new field of scholarship, which one might tentatively call 'modern death studies.' In conversation with fields as diverse as biomedical ethics, US and international law, public policy, philosophy, and cultural history, Stark's book sets out to explore how literature bears witness to new and deeply unsettling experiences of modern death. Contextualizing the debate historically with an analysis of the medicalization and thus 'denaturalization' of death in the 19th century, and 'voluntary death' defended as an 'inalienable human right' after the Shoah in the 20th, Stark explores with exquisite clarity and sensitivity the controversies surrounding the 'right to die."" - Elisabeth Weber, author of
Kill Boxes. Facing the Legacy of US-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention, and Drone Warfare ""Richly interdisciplinary, imaginatively conceived, and powerfully argued, this book fills the gap it locates in its introduction: that we need more subtle and capacious ways of thinking and talking about what is called ‘assisted suicide,' ‘the right to die,' ‘death with dignity,' and other locutions that seem straightforward but quickly become perplexing under scrutiny. Dr. Stark's book will certainly become a necessary first stop for other writers concerned with these terms."" - Melissa Zeiger, author of
Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy ""This important work places the enigmatic appeal for the right to die at the center of contemporary human experience, raising questions about the nature of autonomy, integrity, and dignity - and more generally about the very nature of the human - as they are defined around this urgent and unsettling address. Engaging concrete legal cases and arguments, Stark rethinks central philosophical questions concerning death, life and ethical responsibility in what he calls the 'time of postnatural death.' At the heart of his analysis is ultimately a literary sensibility, displayed in stunning readings of literary and critical texts, that preserves the radical indecipherability of the appeal to die, freeing it from established meanings and allowing for a new thinking of decision and a new dignity 'about which one can only be silent."" - Cathy Caruth, author of
Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History and
Literature in the Ashes of History
