I first became aware of Shannon Dawdy’s American Afterlives during the fall of 2019, when her friend and fellow New…
The Life of American Afterlives
Book blog
Scholars from varying disciplines engage in critical discussions of recent books. Additionally, scholars introduce their books with an original essay or, occasionally, an original essay reviews an important new book, connecting it to other threads of conversation in the academy and beyond.
You can read our very first book forum, on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and the continued discussion around Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age here.
Earth
American Afterlives concludes with the ritualized disinterment of the author’s decomposed corpse. An archaeologist is excavating a twenty-first century cemetery,…
A new American way of death
I can’t think of any scholarly projects, books or otherwise, that begin and end at the author’s grave. And certainly…
Encounters with death in contemporary America
Pieced-together scraps from the cutting room floor—that is how anthropologist and archaeologist Shannon Dawdy describes her book American Afterlives: Reinventing…
Archaeology of a book/film
American Afterlives documents rapidly changing death practices in the United States while asking what this change tells us about American…
Experiments in collective labor
Before The Abyss or Life Is Simple came to my attention, Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book 1 was a fixture on…
Writing living
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six My Struggle novels take a prominent place in the hallway bookshelves of our apartment. Set in…
Refusing the choice: Neither academic nor novelist, an experiment in writing
More than anything, the young Karl Ove Knausgaard wanted to write novels. But he couldn’t. “I couldn’t write, so I…
Us being changed
“I am committed to the idea that the value of this collective’s work has not been dependent on our choice…
The future of us
Audio from the last in-person meeting of A Knausgaard Reading and Writing Collective