Jared Stark

In North America and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, debates over the meaning of suicide became a privileged site for efforts to discover, invent, or limn the conditions of modern selfhood and society and elicited new frameworks for interpreting suicide, particularly in moral philosophy and sociology. Specially attuned to the nature and nuances of this modern conceptualization of suicide are the works of American writer Edith Wharton (1862–1937). From the first poem she ever published (pseudonymously) in 1879 to her final novel, The Gods Arrive, in 1932, Wharton weaves a thread of reflection on the question of what suicide means for modern visions of the ethical subject and of the ethical society. Focusing on three of her earliest texts—her juvenile poem, “Only a Child,” her 1899 story “A Cup of Cold Water,” and her 1903 novella Sanctuary—this chapter investigates how Wharton’s writing foregrounds the figure of the witness to suicide. In so doing, her writing casts critical light on the paradoxical consequences of turn-of-the-twentieth-century efforts to legitimize suicide and to discover in suicide forms of modern authenticity.

To be or not to be-who asks this question today, and how? What does it mean to issue, or respond to, an appeal for the right to die? In A Death of One's Own, the first sustained literary study of the right to die, Jared Stark takes up these timely questions by testing predominant legal understandings of assisted suicide and euthanasia against literary reflections on modern death from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rigorously interdisciplinary and lucidly argued, Stark's wide-ranging discussion sheds critical light on the disquieting bioethical and biopolitical dilemmas raised by contemporary forms of medical technology and legal agency. More than a survey or work of advocacy, A Death of One's Own examines the consequences and limits of the three reasons most often cited for supporting a person's right to die: that it is justified as an expression of personal autonomy or self-ownership; that it constitutes an act of self-authorship, of "choosing a final chapter" in one's life; and that it enables what has come to be called "death with dignity." Probing the intersections of law and literature, Stark interweaves close discussion of major legal, political, and philosophical arguments with revealing readings of literary and testimonial texts by writers including Balzac, Melville, Benjamin, and Amry. A thought-provoking work that will be of interest to those concerned with law and humanities, biomedical ethics, cultural history, and human rights, A Death of One's Own opens new and suggestive paths for thinking about the history of modern death as well as the unsettled future of the right to die.

Of particular importance are the institutional practices of the archives that collect and disseminate testimonies, such as pre-interview and interviewing parameters and protocols, cataloging methods and access policies, and forms of exhibition. Reframing Holocaust Testimony provides the first comprehensive overview of the institutional histories, policies, and practices of the three major archives of Holocaust video testimony: the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, the oral history collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), and the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA), originally founded by Steven Spielberg after the filming of Schindler's List. After a useful methodological and historical introduction, Shenker devotes one chapter each to these archives, drawing on internal working papers, interviews with staff, and other sources to supply cogent and well-researched characterizations of the explicit and implicit preferences, values, and mandates of each institution.