LEARNING TO LIVE, LEARNING TO DIE: WRITING AS MOURNING AND/OR FRAUD IN PETER ACKROYD’S THE LAMBS OF LONDON
LEARNING TO LIVE, LEARNING TO DIE: WRITING AS MOURNING AND/OR FRAUD IN PETER ACKROYD’S THE LAMBS OF LONDON

Summary/Abstract: In The School of the Dead (1994), Hélène Cixous investigates the kinship between writing and death by recalling Montaigne’s famous perspective of philosophy, which identifies philosophizing with dying. This paper suggests a reading of Peter Ackroyd’s Lambs of London in the light of Cixous’s approach, juxtaposed with her “friend” (φίλος) Jacques Derrida’s contributions on memory, mourning and ethics as “learning to live from the ghosts”. Accordingly, the novel will be explored as a literary topos of Mnemosyne, through which the author revives the admiration and longing for Shakespeare, by resurrecting the ghosts of William Ireland, Mary and Charles Lamb.

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