Featured Member shines a spotlight on the diverse research interests of, and the exciting projects undertaken by, those affiliated with the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. In this twelfth instalment of the series, we speak to Zoë Ghyselinck, a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University and a Senior Humboldt Fellow at the University of Regensburg working on modern and contemporary representations of communicating with the dead, mediation, and the development of communication technology. She is currently preparing a project on anticipatory mourning and the posthumous impact of end-of-life narratives, conceived in palliative care by terminally ill parents and grandparents.

Can you tell us a little about your research and how it has developed over the years? What are you currently working on?

Since the beginning of my research activities, two constantly interacting disciplinary fields have been constitutive for my scholarly development and profile: the field of classical reception studies, on the one hand, and modern comparative literary studies, on the other. I have mainly focused on the ways in which and the reasons why religious and ritual aspects in ancient Greek texts are reinterpreted in modern Western (primarily German and French) literary phenomena and cultural concepts. Apart from some contributions on late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century and recently also contemporary literature, the predominant temporal framework in which I have been working during the last decade is the (early) twentieth century. I have systematically enriched the study of literary texts with several other literary media, starting with theatre, but also film and radio plays. I was trained as a text-oriented scholar, and got into narratology, but I nevertheless remain broadly culturally oriented.

During my PhD research, I investigated the reception of ancient Greek tragedy and the philosophical concept of the tragic in early-twentieth-century German neoclassical drama. Inspired by idiosyncratic readings of Nietzsche’s writings, some conservative authors, such as Paul Ernst (1866–1933) elaborated a heroic ideal of a tragic and so-called life-affirming style (or ‘Form’) in literary and poetic works. This ideal took on a strong socially-critical character and gradually developed throughout his writings towards a spiritual, ascetic, and self-destructive (and thus rather ‘formless’ and anti-Nietzschean) model. This research project resulted in my first monograph, Form und Formauflösung der Tragödie. Die Poetik des Tragischen und der Tragödie als religiöses Erneuerungsmüster in den Schriften Paul Ernsts (1866-1933), which was published by De Gruyter in 2015.

Currently, I am exploring the ways in which the dead talk to each other and/or to the living in the modern and contemporary literary imagination. These forms of communication with the dead, which I call ‘necrodialogues’, are part of a diachronic and cross-cultural phenomenon that has found expression in ritual mourning practices, such as necromancy, as well as in literary traditions since antiquity (e.g. in the katábasis motif). As my research has demonstrated so far, literary necrodialogues feature mediatory tools and processes. By ‘mediation’ I mean the channels and means through which the living and/or the dead (try to) make contact. This involves (human) mediators as well as technical media in the broadest sense of the Greek word ‘technè’ (τέχνη), which can enter into hybrid forms with the human media and lead to a ‘necrodialogical use’ of all sorts of artifacts.

In my second monograph, Communicating with the Dead in Contemporary Western Literature: Spiritual Mediums and Technical Media (Routledge, forthcoming in 2023), I analyse a diachronic corpus of literary necrodialogues, each interwoven with dominant changes in media history. I aim to demonstrate how mediation in necrodialogues determines the ways in which the dead communicate, and how it exposes the unbridgeable distance between the living and the dead. I will focus on forms and effects of human and technical mediation and explore the ways in which mediation offers methods to negotiate the unknown, the problematic, and the taboo. In this way, I will show how necrodialogues can be read as cultural indices of the creative and spiritual effort to connect life and death, which technological change evokes and simultaneously puts to the test. I am convinced that studying these necrodialogues from this new perspective and focusing on the ways in which they probe the limits of communicating what is unknown at the borders of life and death will allow new insights in the so-called secularization of our technologically advanced world.

I am using a combined method that blends approaches from literary studies, socio-linguistic conversation analysis, and insights from cultural and religious history. It has long been a tendency in literary studies – largely steeped in late-nineteenth-century secularization theory – to disregard the interfaces between spiritual experience and media-technological advances in the analysis of modern and contemporary literature. In leaving this demarcation behind, I seek to map a critically neglected contemporary field where new technological and media innovations like the smartphone overlap with a much older spiritual or religious desire to (re-)connect the living and the dead. In this respect, the literary necrodialogue becomes a symptom of the post-secular condition: we have, in the famous words of the French sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour, never been modern.

I am strongly inspired by the work of the Canadian scholar of media and religion Jeremy Stolow, who is himself indebted to Latour’s ideas. In the introduction to his edited volume Deus in Machina (2013), Stolow points out that he “seeks to revisit and revise the very supposition that religion and technology exist as two ontologically distinct arenas of experience, knowledge, and action”, rather than “foreclosing discussion about whether and how one must choose between human-built machines and the authentic presence of gods, spirits, and other transcendent forces and things” (p. 2). Furthermore, I engage with a considerable body of theoretical work on the relation between religion and technology which already exists: Jacques Derrida’s “Faith and Knowledge”, Bernard Stiegler’s “Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith”, Regis Debray’s God: An Itinerary, and Hent de Vries’s more recent work on religious and special effects and miracles. In my book, I consider the apparent tendency to hold modern technology as a religious phenomenon as if religion itself were somehow “outside” the history of media and technology. I ask to what extent, for example, this intersection between religion and technology is a modern or post-secular event. In how far might the “religiosity” of technics also imply a certain “machine-like” quality within the religious?

What first attracted you to studying necrodialogues?

My interest in communicating with the dead grew by a detour, yet fits clearly into my diachronic interest in the “Nachleben” of ancient literature and culture. During my first postdoc project, in which I explored the creative potential of the masses on and before early-twentieth-century theatre stages (Ghyselinck, CRJ 2017), I soon became attracted to the new mass medium par excellence: radio. Prompted by Bertolt Brecht’s well-known ideas on radio as a means of communication, I came across his lesser-known radio play Das Verhör des Lukullus (Ghyselinck, GSR 2021). This radio play stages the descent into the underworld by a Roman general, Lukullus, presenting a number of very different forms of masses (including an adaptation of the ancient chorus). I was struck by how seemingly insignificant voices from these masses often turned out to be unheard, suppressed, and dissident voices that challenged the dominant narrative of the protagonist Lukullus.

The conversations Lukullus has in the underworld form the basis for my understanding of the necrodialogue. They clearly align with Lucian’s satirical Dialogues of the Dead (Nekrikoi Diálogoi, second century), on the one hand. On the other hand, the entire story re-enacts the well-known motif of the descent into the underworld (katábasis) as well as the famous mythical judgement, which are much older and more often associated with practices of mourning and remembrance. In delving deeper into this, it quickly became clear to me that twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature (in which the satirical dialogue, in particular, is believed to be dead) brings forth (mixed) forms of communicating with the dead using a wide set of new and salient channels.

Could you tell us more about your planned project on anticipatory mourning and end-of-life narratives?

In the course of my research on necrodialogues, I wondered how to imagine the idea of ‘posthumous communication’ in a broader societal, not necessarily religious, context. After all, how do you transfer into today’s reality a highly aestheticized phenomenon that is tabooed in (particulary Western) society as well as in many religious systems? I cannot completely reconstruct the detour I took, but I ended up with palliative care, and framed the theoretical groundings by research in what is currently known as health humanities.

The new project I am in the process of developing entails the literary-sociological investigation of end-of-life (EOL) narratives that are passed on in palliative care as textual and material keepsakes to (grand-)children. For example, in 2017, a Danish terminally ill father, Lasse Lüders, wrote a narrative farewell letter to his four young children just before his death. In this letter, Lasse tries to imagine what the future will be like without him and how he will no longer be “able to hold [their] little hands when [they] have [their] first day at school” (Holst 2018, ZG).

The creation of EOL narratives marks an increasing trend in European EOL care. This trend aligns with an awareness in both societal and scholarly debates of the modified ways in which the dying anticipate their death: more and more dying people leave stories of their lives and legacy messages as material keepsakes, especially for children for whom the memories of the dying will remain limited. Ranging from written texts to audio-visual recordings, often accompanied by other precious objects, such as photographs and jewellery, EOL narratives are typically communicated in a delayed manner at specific milestones in the children’s future lives (e.g. on birthdays).

Research on storytelling practices in EOL care has neglected the question of how these stories affect the bereaved, and has done even more so looking at this from an intercultural perspective. I hypothesize that imaginative narration, using temporal plot structures, metaphors, and focalization, both facilitates and prevents bereaved recipients (those children and grandchildren) from engaging with identities and experiences dying narrators convey. By comparing selected examples of EOL narratives (both written and spoken) with various degrees of fictionality, I would like to systematically explore which formal and thematic strategies EOL narratives use to navigate between generations and communicate experience across time. I therefore build on the idea from ‘postclassical’ narratology that everyday and fictional storytelling are parts of a larger continuum that mutually interact.

In collaboration with a clinical psychologist, I want to interview bereaved persons who have received EOL narratives. This project thus combines conceptual and analytical tools from literary theory with qualitative methods in narrative inquiry from the social sciences. I enrich this innovative approach with socio-cultural studies on dying and grief as well as with recent insights from materialist turns in religious studies that have stressed the role of non-human agency in processes of meaning making.

I hope to be able to generate socio-cultural knowledge on the neglected sense-making dimensions of this widespread cultural practice and to improve our understanding of the societal functions of the imagination and of proleptic narration (see below).

Many of the research topics you have focused on throughout your career, such as death, mourning, and the tragic, clearly resonate with the field of memory studies. Are there any specific texts, concepts, or methods from memory studies that you have found particularly useful?

I would not describe myself as a cultural memory studies scholar, even though reception studies and memory studies are closely related as they both evoke the dialogue between past and present. Over the years, and in particular in my necrodialogues and EOL narratives projects, however, studies, concepts, and ideas from this field have attracted my attention.

Necrodialogues are quite often concerned with remembering the literary and intellectual canon. Katábasis has been called a ‘memorious’ genre (Scherer & Falconer 2020). The otherworld transforms into an imagined form of a lieu de mémoire (Nora), which is associated with (the limits of) cognition in contemporary postmodern necrodialogues. I interpret ‘the memorious’, of which necrodialogues seem to be capable, within a sociological and technological framework: in recent decades, research has more frequently shown how technological developments as well as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture strongly influence the ways in which people mourn and remember (Erll and Nünning, 2008; Moreman & Lewis 2014; Savin-Baden & Mason-Robbie 2020).

In addition, necrodialogues function as encyclopedic texts, as they ‘descend into’, store, and shape literary memory. Accordingly, they often reflect and problematize authorship (by featuring ‘mediumship’). In Arno Schmidt’s satirical necrodialogue Tina oder über die Unsterblichkeit (1958), for example, the author-narrator gets to take a sightseeing tour of the otherworld, which is an archive-like underworld that forces the dead who are being remembered in a written or oral way to stay forever in this liminal zone. As a consequence, the dead beg to be remembered no more and to be allowed to die at last. In most of my necrodialogues, the idea of memory being a burden or an eternal recourse recurs: the imagined beyond is an in-between zone, in which the dead remain remembered and await an ultimate and unimaginable death – willingly or not.

My work on end-of-life narratives ties in with the notion of ‘anticipatory mourning’, which I associate with active processes of memory making. Proleptic (necessarily imaginative) narration, as in the case of Lasse (see above) resonates with recent future-oriented directions in memory studies that approach the present as object of future memory (cf. Kraenzle and Mayr 2017). In the process of writing this new project, Prof. Stef Craps hinted at his exploration of this concept in his work on ecological mourning (2017). In EOL contexts, the notion requires a complex and layered approach, since it certainly does not apply only to the (future) bereaved who mourn ‘beforehand’. I am particularly interested in the ways in which the dying mourn. The activist character of this form of mourning that Craps perceives in sci-fi and dystopian fiction dealing with “future-history approaches to climate change” (p. 487) clearly aligns with the active and sometimes even ‘rebellious’ (although I am not quite sure whether this is the correct word) ways in which the dying themselves approach the end-of-life, or ‘mortal time’, both in fictional texts and in non-fictional contexts. Knowing your end is approaching activates the dying to (ask for help to) leave something tangible behind. The awareness of future loss in turn makes one appreciate and make sense of the past and present, that is, life, family, friends, (even mortal) time – loss and gain become interchangeable. Anticipatory mourning seems to be particularly activating, strengthens resilience, and correlates with individual and collective forms of active memory making. In health care contexts, narrative memory making can serve as a therapeutic practice for patients and relatives. It consists of an active and constructive process during which patients, in this case the dying, interpret past, present, and (imaginative) future experiences together with relatives and caregivers in particular ways and material forms so that it becomes their desired object of future memory (cf. Currie 2007; Wang 2008). It may be clear that proleptic mourning in the form of acts and processes of remembering is socially and cultural-historically different and indebted to dominant cultural and medical narratives and metaphors (in this regard, I am currently reading the new book by Anita Wohlmann, Metaphor in Illness Writing: Fight and Battle Reused, in which she advocates a reevaluation of traditional metaphors in illness narratives).

Are you collaborating with any other individuals, groups, or networks? How important is collaboration to your research?

Up until now, I have mostly single-authored my articles. Still, my research is the fruit of multiple discussions with peers and has developed out of close collaborations with several experts and research groups. In the Young Academy of Belgium, to which I was elected early this year, the motto is spread that research stemming from one mind is fake research. Fortunately, I had already left the ivory (Blandijn) tower, in which I was isolated during my doctoral research, years ago and no longer needed this motto to realize how much collaboration offers (also fun and a lot of satisfaction, let’s not forget that either).

Together with Dr Elena Fabietti from the University of Regensburg in Germany, where I am currently working as a Senior Humboldt Fellow, I am editing a volume titled Necrodialogues and Media: Communicating with the Dead in the Twentieth- and Twenty-First Centuries. The volume will be published in the spring of 2023 by De Gruyter in the series Media and Cultural Memory, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. In this book, we aim to open a forum of discussion on the topic of communication with the dead from a specific research angle and from a multidisciplinary perspective. We are interested in forms of communication occurring between the world of the living and that of the dead as they are enabled by particular media channels and techniques established in the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through a strong multidisciplinary perspective, we have gathered contributions from tremendously interesting people from various fields of research, including literary studies, media studies, and anthropology (e.g. Anne Kalvig, professor of Religious Studies from the University of Stavanger, Norway). We aim to approach communication with the dead as it is experienced, recounted, and represented not just on the written pages of literary texts, but in the cultural and social life at large, from the religious dimensions of everyday life to ritual practices of mourning and remembrance.

Two years ago, I co-founded the research group ‘Twentieth-Century Crossroads’ (20cc) together with Prof. Birgit Van Puymbroeck (VUB), Dr Cedric Van Dijck (VUB), and Prof. Maaheen Ahmed from the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University. This group aims to bring together and stimulate research on twentieth-century literature, especially modernist literatures and cultures, in different language traditions. It focuses on three intersecting research strands: media and the masses, space and place, and conflict and change. In April 2021, I took the lead in organizing a Doctoral School specialist course, ‘Text, Image, Sound: Intermedial Crossings in Twentieth-Century Mass Media’, together with the ERC-funded COMICS project in our department and the CLIC research group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. We had great keynotes (including Prof. Gabriele Rippl from the University of Bern, an expert in intermediality, and Prof. Peter Buse from the University of Liverpool, who taught us a great deal about the – sometimes dangerous – ‘playful’ and ‘spirited’ aspect of photography) and exceptionally talented PhD students (who are now part of this research group). I am already looking forward to the new specialist course that these enthusiastic colleagues in 20cc are preparing on slow and fast violence (war, mass migration, and collective memory).

Last year, I co-founded the international network ‘Religion, Health, and Humanities Researchers’ (RHHR), together with Dr Adam Powell (Durham University), Prof. Kristy Slominsky (University of Arizona), and Dr Jonathan Zecher (Australian Catholic University). We aim to cultivate international scholarship at the intersection of religion, spirituality, and health, fostering cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural collaborations and increasing the exposure of research in these areas. We are funded for eight years by the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University. In December, we are officially launching the network with roundtable discussions and a keynote lecture by Prof. Anthony Petro from the Department of Religion at Boston University. He will be talking about his book on the religious and public health responses to crises and about his experience running a health humanities programme in Boston.

In recent years, the need to collaborate with the non-academic world has been growing in me. This is mainly connected to my existential and moral doubts about the importance of my research. More and more, I get the impression and confirmation that ‘the outside world’ shows and can have an interest in what I and we do. I try to do my bit, like most researchers here, by contributing to popularizing journals, by giving guest lectures (in schools, but recently also in rest and care homes), and by organizing events for a wide audience. In collaboration with clinical psychologists at the university hospital in Ghent, I am reflecting on adapted (material) forms of EOL narratives for young children, based on my preliminary findings about the reception of these stories.

Are there any recent or forthcoming conferences, exhibitions, or other events that you are particularly enthusiastic about?

I am very excited about the two books currently in the pipeline (the volume edited together with Elena Fabietti and my second monograph).

I am also very much looking forward to several conferences this year. At the 7th Public Health Palliative Care International Conference, ‘Democratizing Caring, Dying, and Grieving: Participation, Action, Understanding, and Evaluation’ in September (Bruges), I will present a preview of my end-of-life narratives project. In November, I will participate in the international conference on ‘Culture and Mental Health’ (Museum Dr Guislain, Ghent). Together with some colleagues – literary scholars from Ghent and the University of Antwerp working at the intersections of literature, psychology, and medicine – we have put together a panel, called ‘Words of Healing, Places of Care’. We will demonstrate how diverse conditions of suffering (physical, mental, and social) and kinds of vulnerable readers with varying psycho-social, cultural, and spiritual backgrounds in four different contexts (geriatrics, EOL contexts, people with disabilities and with mental suffering, traumatized soldiers) require not only different literary works and diversified storytelling techniques, but also adapted material and spatial circumstances in which reading and narrating occur.

Also in November, Prof. Stef Craps and I are organizing an evening of panel discussions on mourning and cultural practices after COVID-19 in De Krook, Ghent’s public library. Together with representatives from the cultural, academic, and medical fields, such as psychiatrist Uus Knops and writer Gaea Schoeters, we will address questions of how cultural mourning practices help to imagine, process, and discuss the overwhelming and often anonymous loss we associate with the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, after a successful first edition of the series ‘Reading in Times of Caring’, Prof. Jürgen Pieters and I are going to organize another evening discussion series, on ‘vulnerable reading’ this time, in the second semester. This will again take place at De Krook, in collaboration with the Academies for Lifelong Learning of the faculties of Arts and Philosophy, Medicine and Health Sciences, and Psychology and Educational Sciences. We have nominated the Canadian sociologist Arthur Frank, known for his book The Wounded Storyteller, as a candidate for the Francqui Chair, and if all goes well, Prof. Frank will be delivering a number of sessions on stories, care, and vulnerability at our university and for a broader public during the second semester.

WORKS CITED

CRAPS, S. (2017). Climate Change and the Art of Anticipatory Memory. Parallax 23(5): 479–492.

CURRIE, M. (2007). About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time. Edinburgh University Press.

ERLL, A. & NÜNNING, A. (eds). (2008). A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. De Gruyter.

GHYSELINCK, Z. (2017). Looking Back: Reception as Creative Sparagmos: Oskar Kokoschka’s Orpheus und Eurydike Revised. Classical Receptions Journal 9(4): 527–545.

GHYSELINCK, Z. (2021). Das Unterweltverhör: Metamediale Überlegungen in modernen Nekrodialogen von Bertolt Brecht und Walter Jens. German Studies Review 44(3): 509–526.

HOLST, C. (2018). Lasses sidste brev til sine børn: Tag godt imod jeres nye far. Ude og hjemme. https://www.udeoghjemme.dk/skaebner/udsatte-mennesker/lasses-sidste-brev-til-sine-boern-tag-godt-imod-jeres-nye-far. Last retrieved January 11, 2022.

KRAENZLE, K. & MAYR, M. (2017). The Changing Place of Europe in Global Memory Cultures: Usable Pasts and Futures. Palgrave Macmillan.

LATOUR, B. (1997). Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: Essay d’anthropologie symetrique. Paris. La Découverte.

MOREMAN, Ch. & LEWIS, A. (2014). Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Mortal Age. Praeger.

SAVIN-BADEN, M. & MASON-ROBBIE, V. (2020). Digital Afterlife: Death Matters in a Digital Age. Routledge.

SCHERER, M. & FALCONER, R. (2020). A Quest for Remembrance. The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature. Routledge.

STOLOW, J. (2013). Deus in Machina: Technology and the Things in Between. Fordham University Press.

WANG, Q. (2008). On the Cultural Constitution of Collective Memory. Memory 16(3): 305–317.

WOHLMANN, A. (2022), Metaphor in Illness Writing: Fight and Battle Reused. Edinburgh University Press.

Interview conducted via email by Ida Olsen.