Introduction, in S. Corso, F. Mussgnug, J. Rushworth, Dwelling on Grief. Narratives Across Time and Forms, Oxford: Legenda, 2022.

Mourning, as the experience of the pandemic reminds us, crosses the dividing lines between life and literature, and blurs any attempted opposition of the private and the familial versus the professional and the academic. This insight about the imbrication of life and writing is framed in the essays that follow. We suggest, with Jacques Derrida, that: On ne peut pas tenir un discours sur le ‘travail du deuil’ sans y prendre part [...]. Il n’y a donc pas de métalangage quant au langage où s’engage un travail du deuil. [One cannot hold a discourse on the ‘work of mourning’ without taking part in it […]. There is thus no metalanguage for the language in which a work of mourning is at work.] One of the connecting threads of our volume is this tension between consideration of discourses on mourning across different disciplines and fields — in particular, Comparative Literature, Modern Languages, English, Medieval Studies, Political Thought, Music, Biology and the Environmental Humanities — and an acknowledgement of the ways in which metalanguage breaks down and is punctuated by experience.