Jason Schneiderman: Elegiac Focus: Visibility of the Mourned and the Mourner (July 2025)

Elegy is a mixture of love and loss, and love is always relational: there must be a lover and a beloved, though the terms of that love, and the terms of the resulting loss are always distinct, specific, and unique. And if the terms of love are always contingent on time, place, culture and circumstance, so are the terms of loss. If the Elegy is designed to make the reader feel the sense of grief experienced by the griever, then there are two primary focal points: the griever and the grieved. In evoking that grief in the reader, the writer can foreground themselves and their own experience of grief, or they can foreground the lost beloved. In looking at poetry and fiction that evokes loss, we will consider how writers work in a shifting parallax view of griever and grieved, bringing one into focus, bringing both into focus, or bringing neither into focus. We will also include brief discussions of how written elegies differ from visual representations on stage and screen.