Waking the Dead: Antigone, Ismene and Anne Enright's Narrators in Mourning

Reflecting in 2008 on the link between her groundbreaking work on gender and her more recent work on war, Judith Butler proposed a relationship between liveable and grievable lives: 'it is very often a struggle to make certain kinds of lost life publicly grievable'. This essay takes Butler's exploration of the 'politics of mourning' as its starting place for a reading of The Gathering and of the short story, 'My Little Sister' from Taking Pictures.