Main description:

This volume is the continuation of the book Suicide in Modern Literature, edited by Josefa Ros Velasco. Considering the positive reception of this book, Ros Velasco launches the second part, entitled The Contemporary Writer and their Suicide. This time, leading representatives of various disciplines analyze the literary, philosophical, and biographical works of contemporary writers worldwide who attempted to commit suicide or achieved their goal, looking for covert and overt clues about their intentions in their writings. This book aims to continue shedding light on the social and structural causes that lead to suicide and on the suicidal mind, but also to show that people assiduous to writing usually reflect their intentions to commit suicide in their writings, to explain how these frequently veiled intentions can be revealed and interpreted, and to highlight the potential of artistic, philosophical, and autobiographical writing as a tool to detect suicidal ideation and prevent its consummation in vulnerable people. This book analyzes several case studies and their allusions to their contexts and the socio-structural and environmental violence and pressures they suffered, expressions of their will and agency, feelings of dislocation between the individual, reality, and existential alienation, and literary styles, writing techniques, and metaphorical language.

Contents:

Part I. Suicide in contemporary writers caused by socio-structural and environmental violence and pressures.- 1. Beyond the Wertherian motif of suicide: The unity of the self in Karoline von Gunderrode's death.- 2. 'I manage it': Analyzing tropes of suicide in Sylvia Plath's writing.- 3. Virginia Woolf's suicidal character(s): Schizophrenia and the rebellion against the body and the self in her literary works.- 4. 'Death beats in my heart everyday': A sociological reading of suicidal intent in Sara Shagufta's works.- 5. Inside the medical suicidal mind: Felipe Trigo's death by suicide and its self-novelization as a way of understanding suicide in contemporary practitioners.- 6. The problem of suicide in Kafka. An ethical or aesthetical problem?.- 7. The tragedy of Vladimir Mayakovsky: Suicide as a dialectical dilemma.- 8. Paul Celan. The abyss of the word 'forgiveness'.- 9. 'Lines of flight': The deterritorialization of Gilles Deleuze.- . Part II. Suicide in contemporary writers as an expression of the will, the dislocation between the individual and the reality, and existential alienation.- 10. The ontological suicide of Philipp Mainlander: A search for redemption through nothingness.- 11. Simone Weil, martyr or suicide? Between martyrdom and suicide: The question of the meaning of life and death.- 12. The fall of a legend: Deleuze's suicide and his Spinoza.- 13. Is suicide a choice? Suicide and Sophie's choice in William Styron.- 14. Mortality and meaninglessness: Leo Tolstoy and Mickey Sachs reconsidered.- 15. Carlo Michelstaedter and the philosophical suicide.- 16. 'Two-Gun Bob' on the pyre: Robert E. Howard's suicide in the context of his life and work.- 17. The confusing anxiety of Ryunosuke Akutagawa.- 18. Through the mask. Behind the Osamu Dazai's smile.- 19. The catastrophe of the self: The case of Unica Zurn.- . Part III. Suicide in contemporary writers understood through their literary styles, their writing techniques, and their metaphorical language.- 20. Sylvia Plath: Suicidal tendencies in life, poems, and fiction.- 21. 'Dying is an art': Death in the art of Sylvia Plath.- 22. 'One wrist, then the other wrist': The mind style of a suicidal protagonist as portrayed in Sylvia Plath's The bell jar.- 23. Reflection of suicidal tendencies in poetry: A computational analysis of gender-themed versus general-themed poetry by Cesare Pavese, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath.- 24. Black and blue: Revealing suicidality in the poetry of the Afro-German writer-activist, May Ayim.- 25. Words in poetry: Early and late poems by Haizi.- 26. Being suicidal after birth: Recoveries of Brooke Shields in Down came the rain, Elif Safak in Siyah Sut (Black milk), and Fuani Marino in Svegliami a Mezzanotte (Wake me up in the midnight) from ecolinguistic perspectives.