ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relation of death – and particularly the irresistible facticity of death – to the literary or, more generally, to the aesthetic genres of irony, melodrama, and tragedy. It focuses on Samuel Shem’s novel, The House of God, which portrays medical students encountering death and dying on a daily basis for the first time in their lives; the melodrama of John Donne and Dylan Thomas heroically confronting death; and the awe-inspiring tragedy of Margaret Edson’s drama Wit. The chapter examines what the author calls the “affective comprehension” accomplished by the “forms” of literary genres in relation to evolutionarily developed defense mechanisms. It also examines the ways literary genres call upon and reground primal emotions of fear, anger, and surprise – emotions that respond to life-threatening situations – as the laughter, triumph, and awe that constitute, in basic ways, the affective comprehension of literary genres.
