Vigilant memory

Spargo begins by reconsidering mourners who refuse comfort, such as Niobe and Hamlet. He argues that grief often depends, at least for a time, on rejecting consolation. When a mourner disrupts the usual social and psychological roles of grief, mourning becomes an ethical act.

He traces these ethical forms of mourning in the English and American elegiac tradition, where they often stand against conventional displays of sorrow. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur, Bernard Williams and Emmanuel Levinas, he explores the ethics of anti-consolatory grief. His close readings range from Hamlet, Milton and Renaissance elegists to Dickinson, Shelley and Hardy, and then to the Holocaust elegies of Sylvia Plath and Randall Jarrell.