Mit Den Toten Sprechen: Jenseitsnarrative in Literatur Und Kunst Der Gegenwart

We are currently experiencing intense controversy with death in public debates. But also in art, literature, opera and film and, last but not least, in social media, the transitions between life and death are being questioned in a completely new way and traditional worlds of imagination are being supplemented by a technical and virtual dimension. In the course of modernization and secularization, traditional ways of dealing with dying, death and mourning have changed and generally accepted images of death have lost their binding force. For many people, religious ideas about the hereafter have become fragile - but the existential questions about 'life' after death have remained. The articles in the volume ask what images and narratives are used to reflect on an afterlife today. What relevance do well-known border crossers like Odysseus, Orpheus, Aeneas and Dante and traditional spatial concepts of Hades and Orkus, heaven and hell have? From an interdisciplinary perspective, he traces the panorama of today's conceptions of the hereafter in the field of tension between tradition and innovation and thus tracks down the diverse concepts of the hereafter.