Catherine KOUYOUMDJIAN

My research focuses on representations of death ( agony and rituals , eschatological becoming, commemoration ) and mourning in 19th century literature and more specifically poetry. The aim is to see how religious, literary and mythological discourses inform the poet's discourse, and how the latter can distance himself from them. My work on the dead and mourning leads me to question certain literary genres linked to mourning (elegy, epitaphs, eulogies, funeral graffiti...) to analyze their use in a specific context.My questioning of death generates peripheral questions relating to Time, melancholy and Nostalgia.

My approach to mourning and death is also part of a gendered approach to literary texts insofar as women occupy a prominent place in the handling of mourning . Whether as mourner, burier or psychopomp agent, it would seem that she who gives life also intervenes in important anthropopological stages of the rituals of passage.