Fabry, Regina E. (2024) On the Epistemic Status of Literary Nonfiction in Philosophical Grief Research. [Preprint]
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Abstract
Recently, research on grief has gained momentum in phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Grief, it is often assumed, is a temporally extended emotional experience of the irreversible, bereavement-induced loss of a significant person. Within and across philosophical approaches, grief memoirs are frequently quoted as phenomenological evidence for the tenability of assumptions about the occurrence, structure, and unfolding of grief experiences. In this article, I argue that this research strategy is problematic. The reason is that it overlooks the epistemic status and artefactual configuration of grief memoirs. They are not first-person reports of lived experiences, but carefully crafted and curated literary artefacts. As such, they explore and challenge the possibilities and limitations of autobiographical remembering, acts of remembrance, master narratives, and genre expectations. For this reason, grief memoirs should not be treated as phenomenological evidence, but as exemplars of literary griefworld technologies. The positive proposal is that the interdisciplinary investigation of grief memoirs could lead to new insights into the role of literary self-narrative practices for navigating and negotiating processes of grief.
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Item Type: | Preprint | ||||||
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Keywords: | Grief; phenomenology; self-narrative; memoir; narrative practices | ||||||
Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science General Issues > Evidence General Issues > Explanation |
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Depositing User: | Dr Regina E. Fabry | ||||||
Date Deposited: | 09 Oct 2024 13:22 | ||||||
Last Modified: | 09 Oct 2024 13:22 | ||||||
Item ID: | 24031 | ||||||
Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science General Issues > Evidence General Issues > Explanation |
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Date: | 9 October 2024 | ||||||
URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/24031 |
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