The field of memory studies contains no dearth of scholarship on the subject of mourning and its associated ritual, commemorative, and even legal practices. Yet, where one might hear "elegiac" used to describe elements of a memorial, little study has been devoted to elegy, the poetry of mourning, as a mnemonic device proper. While mourning and its associated verse are transcultural phenomena, the term elegy stems from the Greek elegeia, which denotes more formal and metrical priorities rather than thematic ones; by modern definition, elegy is a poetic genre concerned with loss, considered by literary scholars as a "process" of mourning (Princeton, Green, et. al. 2012). Freud's melancholia, his term and writings adopted by memory scholars, helps to characterize the shift in elegiac poetry from that which assuages grief to that which indulges or even exacerbates it. Jahan Ramazani writes in his 1994 text, Poetry of Mourning, that "the modern elegy offers not a guide to 'successful' mourning but a spur to rethinking the vexed experience of grief in the modern world" (Ramazani 1994). Elegy, as this "spur," is not simply a cultural product but is a tool by which poets-and readers of poetry-may infiltrate or ignite memory. Published in 1995, at the hinge between the modern and the post-9/11 eras, Anne Carson's Glass, Irony & God contains multiple meditations on the "vexed experience of grief" that characterizes her social and historical context.
Where scholars have focused on her popular poem "The Glass Essay" as an examination of intimate, romantic grieving, I argue for a reading of an oft-overlooked poem, "TV Men: Hektor," as part of her elegiac oeuvre. The "TV Men" series of poems reimagines figures of literature and philosophy as subjects of the modern news cycle. In "Hektor," the poet tracks the prince of Troy from Homer's Iliad as an unfortunate actor who is at once unsuited for and unable to escape his tragic role. Located at the intersection of classical reception, mourning literature, and modern media developments, "TV Men: Hektor" provides an opportunity to leverage memory studies for contemporary poetry analysis and, conversely, to enrich the study of collective memory via the study of elegy. Holding in mind the relationship between mourning and memory, bolstered by a range of texts from Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life to contemporary scholarship on mnemohistory and mnemonic devices, I will also identify the role of the ubiquitous but elusive "TV" that permeates Carson's poem. Here, I argue for a reading of Carson's "TV" as a technology of memory within another technology of memory-that of the poem itself. Both "technologies" (news/media and poetry) perform critical roles in contemporary and historical engagements with death and mourning. Ultimately, I present a case for the transdisciplinary communication of elegy- and memory-studies.
