A Death of One’s Own

To be or not to be—who asks this question today, and how? What does it mean to issue, or respond to, an appeal for the right to die? In A Death of One’s Own: Literature, Law, and the Right to Die, Jared Stark takes up these timely questions by testing predominant legal understandings of assisted suicide and euthanasia against literary reflections on modern death from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rigorously interdisciplinary and lucidly argued, Stark’s wide-ranging discussion sheds critical light on the disquieting bioethical and biopolitical dilemmas raised by contemporary forms of medical technology and legal agency.

Join us to explore these themes with the author, Jared Stark (Professor of Comparative Literature, Eckerd College) and Cathy Caruth (Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, Cornell University).