Editorial

Abstract

This year’s special issue, titled The (Un)Speakability of Death: Contemporary Literarisations and Visualisations of Dying, explores how literature and film engage with death as a phenomenon that is both anthropologically fundamental and linguistically elusive. At its core lies the tension between what can and cannot be expressed, between representation and absence— a tension that is made aesthetically productive.

Through four original articles, two conversations, and one report, the issue examines how fictional and factual texts, as well as various genres, imagine spaces of experience and employ media strategies to render liminal phenomena such as dying visible. Death is thus not conceived as a finite experience, but as a discursively charged void that calls for images where language reaches its limits.

Cover image: Egon Schiele Withering Sunflower