Fragments of a Consolatory Discourse: Sontag, Riley, Proust, Barthes

Abstract

In the book’s final chapter, a discussion of Will Schwalbe’s The End of Your Life Book Club, a bibliotherapeutic memoir of the author’s mother’s end-of-life phase leads to a discussion of related writings by David Rieff (on his mother, Susan Sontag), Denise Riley (Time Lived, Without its Flow, an essay on the death of her son Jacob) and Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, written at the occasion of his mother’s death. The analyses of these writings build on the previous chapters’ analysis of the modern regime of consolation.