Desublimating Death in Liquid Modernity: Familiarity and Absurdity of the Sublime in Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and Albee’s The Sandbox

This paper examines the desublimation of death in Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and Edward Albee’s play The Sandbox. It focused on how each text reconfigures death beyond its traditional association with transcendence and awe. The study used a qualitative, text-based approach to show how Dickinson domesticates death by representing it in a familiar ambient and temporal suspension, while Albee presents death as a trivial, visible, and emotionally detached event. Drawing on the concept of liquid modernity, the study explains how these representations reflect different stages of dissolving stable meaning and concepts in modernity. While previous studies have discussed death and the sublime within individual texts, limited attention has been given to comparative desublimation across genres. This study highlights the different poetic and theatrical representations of death within these two texts, which showcase the shifting of stable meaning and cultural consciousness in modern society.