This course will explore the ways that poets, novelists, visual artists, philosophers and other thinkers, from a range of periods and cultural traditions, reflect on the claims that death places upon the living. We will direct our focus especially toward the paradoxical character of death as an experience that is at once guaranteed to befall us but that we are definitionally incapable of experiencing: What are we to make of this experience of the end that is, in itself, the end of experience? How does death structure our lives, and how has our relationship to it changed over the last two centuries?
