'Now thou art an O without a figure': A Feminine Hermeneutics of Absence and the Early Modern Theatre

My doctoral research will explore grief through a hermeneutical approach in considering how grief may be understood as an apophatic (unsayable) discourse. Contra traditional psychological models of grief, this project will demonstrate the need to understand grief qualitatively through the medium of literature, and moreover will focus on writing as experiential. In this way, loss will be understood as leading both to and away from language, and mourning will be posited as a process of metamorphosis which (de)constructs (non)selfhood. Emphasis will thus be given to the (un)solvability of grief through cyclical mourning, contrasting with linear models emphasizing recovery.

To expand on the research question above, this PhD will analyze existential grief in a contemporary context and aim to understand grief as an unsayable discourse emanating from the no-thingness of existence. This will be executed through a quadripartite interdisciplinary methodology combining philosophy, religion, literature and hermeneutics. It will explore the relationship between grief and apophasis, focusing on writing as a (de)generative process of recurrent mourning. The first chapter will outline the existential plight in our current European context, lamenting the instability of reality in the absence of God, which has been exposed by the fracturing of Western discourse through poststructuralist movements. This chapter will engage with key existential and postmodern figures such as Soren Kierkegaard, Fredrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida, outlining the present post postmodern existential crisis of identity and demonstrate its relationship to grief. The second chapter will then develop existential grief as an apophatic (incommunicable) discourse, and will primarily draw upon William Franke and Michael Sells, demonstrating its aim through the literature of C.S. Lewis and Shakespearean Tragedy. Chapter Three will subsequently take a phenomenological turn, demonstrating writing as an experiential process of mourning in terms of identity (de)construction via kinetic negation. This will be explored through the works of Hélène Cixous, Martin Heidegger, Catherine Keller and the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Finally, Chapter Four will explore Derridean notions of the nominal proper as apophatic in (non)relation to the deceased, understanding death as Absolute Loss-the beginning and end point of all grief and contingent mourning.

The original contribution of this project is its highly interdisciplinary study of grief, which has had more emphasis in quantitative research through the social and natural sciences. It will therefore provide a new understanding of grief/mourning in the humanities that does not follow clinical or recovery pathways. Furthermore, it will also contribute to newly emerging scholarship on contemporary apophatics and theopoetics by merging both discourses in the nodal study of grief, and will moreover revive existential thought within immediate consciousness. Questions surrounding mourning and identity are especially pertinent in our present era, which does not yet have a language to define itself, thereby eliciting grief and uncertainty surrounding cultural and self-identification.