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Death and Tenses

By Neil Kenny

Product Image: Death and Tenses

Death and Tenses

By Neil Kenny

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Description
In what tense should we refer to the dead? The question has long been asked, from Cicero to Julian Barnes, and answering it is partly a matter of grammar and stylistic convention. But the hesitation, annoyance, even distress that can be caused by the "wrong" tense suggests that more may be at stake--our very relation to the dead. This book, the first to test that hypothesis, investigates how tenses were used in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France (especially in French but also in Latin) to refer to dead friends, lovers, family members, enemies, colleagues, writers, officials, kings and queens of recent times, but also to those who had died long before, whether Christ, the saints, or the ancient Greeks and Romans who posthumously filled the minds of Renaissance humanists. Did tenses refer to the dead in ways that granted them differing degrees of presence (and absence)? Did tenses communicate dimensions of posthumous presence (and absence) that partly eluded more concept-based affirmations? The investigation ranges from funerary and devotional writing to Eucharistic theology, from poetry to humanist paratexts, from Rabelais's prose fiction to Montaigne's Essais. Primarily a work of literary and cultural history, it also draws on early modern grammatical thought and on modern linguistics (with its concept of aspect and its questioning of "tense"), while arguing that neither can fully explain the phenomena studied. The book briefly compares early modern usage with tendencies in modern French and English in the West, asking whether changes in belief about posthumous survival have been accompanied by changes in tense-use.
Product details
Edition:
1
Number of Pages:
306
Release Date:
2016-02-17
Publication Date:
2016-02-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press(UK)
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
0198754035
ISBN13:
9780198754039
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
625 g
Height:
161 cm
Width:
240 cm
Thickness:
21 cm
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