The scenography of death in contemporary poetry
The case of Vicent Andrés Estellés
From the perspective of new studies on
spatiality, which favours the concept of
place (as opposed to the broader concept of
space), representations of death are linked to
specific places that are typical of each culture. In our current
culture, places such as the sanatorium, the hospital, the dying
house, the coffin and the cemetery are often related to the concept
of heterotopia designed years ago by Michel
Foucault. Some types of heterotopia that are related to death have a
high performance in the semiotics of contemporary poetry. In his
work, the Catalan poet Vicent Andrés Estellés (1924–1993) depicts
scenes of death that integrate many of these places, objects,
characters and sequences of actions. This scenography, which is
strongly shaped by metaphorical and metonymic mappings, is an
essential ingredient of his poetic semiosis as part of the treatment
of the subject matter of death and dying.
Article outline
- Cultural and literary representations of death
- Spatiality
- A case study: The poetry of Vicent Andrés Estellés
- The Avunculus
- The father, bereft of his daughter
- The poet’s own death
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