From Coffined Corpses to Corpsemanure. James Joyce’s Other Corpses

1noThere is something about the dead which makes them utterly problematic and awkward to deal with. Unlike other forms of otherness which we can at least attempt to comprehend (and therefore somehow tame), the corpse’s material (non?) life exists not only when life as universally conceived is over, but exactly because it is over. Corpses possess the disturbing power of transforming what is well known into something which is utterly other: something which (at least initially) still looks like the person who has died but it is not that person anymore. Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror famously sees the corpse as the location of the abject par excellence, while in The Work of Mourning Derrida envisages in the lost ones a form of otherness who cannot be appropriated, not even by close family and friends, as this attempt is nothing but an endless series of memories, moments, stories, narrations in the minds of different people. In light of these considerations, and with an awareness of the visibility of the corpse in human culture both as an ethical and social preoccupation and as “object” for artistic imagination, the aim of this essay is to investigate and reflect on the presence and function of the corpse in Joyce’s texts and, more specifically, on its function as the location for extreme and untreatable forms of alterityreservedmixedLaura PelaschiarPelaschiar, Laur