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The Dominion of the Dead

The Dominion of the Dead
By Robert Pogue Harrison

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How do the living maintain relations to the dead? Why do we bury people when they die? And what is at stake when we do? In The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison considers the supreme importance of these questions to Western civilization, exploring the many places where the dead cohabit the world of the living—the graves, images, literature, architecture, and monuments that house the dead in their afterlife among us.

This elegantly conceived work devotes particular attention to the practice of burial. Harrison contends that we bury our dead to humanize the lands where we build our present and imagine our future. As long as the dead are interred in graves and tombs, they never truly depart from this world, but remain, if only symbolically, among the living. Spanning a broad range of examples, from the graves of our first human ancestors to the empty tomb of the Gospels to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Harrison also considers the authority of predecessors in both modern and premodern societies. Through inspired readings of major writers and thinkers such as Vico, Virgil, Dante, Pater, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Rilke, he argues that the buried dead form an essential foundation where future generations can retrieve their past, while burial grounds provide an important bedrock where past generations can preserve their legacy for the unborn.

The Dominion of the Dead is a profound meditation on how the thought of death shapes the communion of the living. A work of enormous scope, intellect, and imagination, this book will speak to all who have suffered grief and loss.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #206877 in Books
  • Published on: 2005-05-27
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 224 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Ranging over a variety of classical, biblical and modern philosophical sources, Harrison (Forests: The Shadow of Civilization) attempts nothing less than to reacquaint Western culture with its own thinking on death and, by doing so, to change its comportment toward mortality—and toward life. Among the book’s many hermeneutic passages is a chapter titled "Hic Jacet" (the "Here Lies" of Roman gravestones), which discusses Walt Whitman’s "burial" of the Civil War in his poem "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d." Another chapter, titled "Hic Non Est" (or "He is not here" from the Gospel of Mark), unpacks historically variant meanings of the emptiness of Christ’s tomb. Heidegger’s thinking on "Being" permeates every chapter of this book; the discussion of how the living get appropriated by history via the dead is nothing short of fascinating. Passing subjects include Homer, Rimbaud, Thoreau, Descartes, Pater, Poe, Hopkins and Rilke—to name just a few of the poets and thinkers whose work is discussed. A chaired professor of Italian literature at Stanford, Harrison also incorporates interpretations of lesser known portions of Petrarch, Leopardi, Vico, Pirandello, Croce, Ungaretti and Caproni. The result is something like a guide to the care of the self (and society) through an analysis of the care for the dead, written in a manner that is inimitable, provocative and intellectually compelling.
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Review
"This is the best book ever written about the cultural meaning of burial, our need to remember the dead (hence our need for history), and the deeper than etymological link between the human and the humus." - Jonathan Bate, Times Literary Supplement; "A guide to the care of self (and society) through an analysis of the care for the dead, written in a manner that is inimitable, provocative and intellectually compelling." - Publishers Weekly; "A significant and learned treatise on something that should concern all of us." - Jack Matthews, Washington Times; "A penetrating look into the realm of the dead." - Bernadette Murphy, Los Angeles Times Book Review; "Harrison... has a rare poetic intelligence that does not shrink from speculative immensity.... In a kind of literary seance, the voices of the dead - poets like Swinburne and Homer, writers like Conrad and Joyce, philosophers like Vico and Heidegger - shape the text.... By the end one begins to think differently about the living as well as the dead." - Edward Rothstein, New York Times; "A daring and ambitious book.... The subject is one in which the reader participates, and it will not end as long as there is someone to ponder it." - W. S. Merwin, New York Review of Books"

From the Inside Flap

How do the living maintain relations to the dead? Why do we bury people when they die? And what is at stake when we do? In The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison considers the supreme importance of these questions to Western civilization, exploring the many places where the dead cohabit the world of the living—the graves, images, literature, architecture, and monuments that house the dead in their afterlife among us.

This elegantly conceived work devotes particular attention to the practice of burial. Harrison contends that we bury our dead to humanize the lands where we build our present and imagine our future. As long as the dead are interred in graves and tombs, they never truly depart from this world, but remain, if only symbolically, among the living. Spanning a broad range of examples, from the graves of our first human ancestors to the empty tomb of the Gospels to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Harrison also considers the authority of predecessors in both modern and premodern societies. Through inspired readings of major writers and thinkers such as Vico, Virgil, Dante, Pater, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Rilke, he argues that the buried dead form an essential foundation where future generations can retrieve their past, while burial grounds provide an important bedrock where past generations can preserve their legacy for the unborn.

The Dominion of the Dead is a profound meditation on how the thought of death shapes the communion of the living. A work of enormous scope, intellect, and imagination, this book will speak to all who have suffered grief and loss.

Customer Reviews

nil nisi bonum5
As could be expected, Robert Pogue Harrison presents a thoughtful and elegant meditation on remembrance and the power of the dead for the living. It is curious to see how many patterns the dead fashion for us in our care for them. Though versions of Heideggerian phenomenology and the philology of Vico inform threads of the argument, at no time does the poetic work find itself in a bog of theory for the sake of theory. Also pleasing for this reader is Harrison's willingness to traverse the exigencies of the moment and its hyperpatriotic upwellings, (so common and gauche over the last few years,) so he can dwell on the traditional and lasting relations the dead and the living maintain. The passages on Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial resounded with an appropriately complex and awesome response. The argument's course runs through a dead realm with emphasis on Europe and the United States. Fruitful studies of the ancestral dead exist for Mayan and Chinese and Egyptian civilizations (to name a few), yet these do not fit the purview here. Such inclusion might have matured or at least ripened a western view on this mortal matter. I very much enjoyed this tour of thought through poetry, myth, memorial and monument. It does nothing if not enrich with shiny insights on the dead in our myths and lives.