Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10342099
Katherine Kruger
Changes to working life and retirement are reshaping temporalities of aging. This essay identifies a growing interest by women writers in the narrative possibilities these changes present. Examining the relation between narrative form, aging, and precarious work in Deborah Levy's The Cost of Living (2018) and Jenny Offill's Weather (2020), this essay argues that contemporary narratives of midlife aging offer evidence of new and different conceptions and representations of time, whereby time is shaped by the elongated precarity of care and work. The argument builds on work by Lauren Berlant (2011), Elizabeth Povinelli (2011), and Lisa Baraitser (2017) that claims that the challenges of the twenty-first century demand that we reimagine future time through the lens of endurance and finds a model for endurance in the time frames of maintenance and milling proposed in The Cost of Living and Weather.
{"title":"Aging through Precarious Time: Maintenance and Milling in The Cost of Living and Weather","authors":"Katherine Kruger","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10342099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10342099","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Changes to working life and retirement are reshaping temporalities of aging. This essay identifies a growing interest by women writers in the narrative possibilities these changes present. Examining the relation between narrative form, aging, and precarious work in Deborah Levy's The Cost of Living (2018) and Jenny Offill's Weather (2020), this essay argues that contemporary narratives of midlife aging offer evidence of new and different conceptions and representations of time, whereby time is shaped by the elongated precarity of care and work. The argument builds on work by Lauren Berlant (2011), Elizabeth Povinelli (2011), and Lisa Baraitser (2017) that claims that the challenges of the twenty-first century demand that we reimagine future time through the lens of endurance and finds a model for endurance in the time frames of maintenance and milling proposed in The Cost of Living and Weather.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48469124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10342239
Other| June 01 2023 Notes on Contributors Poetics Today (2023) 44 (1-2): 295–297. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10342239 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Notes on Contributors. Poetics Today 1 June 2023; 44 (1-2): 295–297. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10342239 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPoetics Today Search Advanced Search Elizabeth Barry is professor of modern literature in the Department of English at the University of Warwick, UK. She works in the fields of modern literary studies, medical humanities and—predominantly—literary age studies, and has published on representations of aging in the work of Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, Alice Munro, and Margaret Atwood, among others. She edited the Boydell collection Literature and Ageing with Margery Vibe Skagen in 2020 and is writing a monograph on aging and the experience of time in modern literature and thought, to appear in 2024.Alice Crossley is a senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Lincoln. Her research focuses on intersections between age and gender (especially masculinity) in texts primarily by Victorian and modernist writers. In the field of aging studies her work includes Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Fiction (2018) and an article on asynchronicity and aging queerly in the short fiction of... You do not currently have access to this content.
{"title":"Notes on Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10342239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10342239","url":null,"abstract":"Other| June 01 2023 Notes on Contributors Poetics Today (2023) 44 (1-2): 295–297. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10342239 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Notes on Contributors. Poetics Today 1 June 2023; 44 (1-2): 295–297. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10342239 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPoetics Today Search Advanced Search Elizabeth Barry is professor of modern literature in the Department of English at the University of Warwick, UK. She works in the fields of modern literary studies, medical humanities and—predominantly—literary age studies, and has published on representations of aging in the work of Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, Alice Munro, and Margaret Atwood, among others. She edited the Boydell collection Literature and Ageing with Margery Vibe Skagen in 2020 and is writing a monograph on aging and the experience of time in modern literature and thought, to appear in 2024.Alice Crossley is a senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Lincoln. Her research focuses on intersections between age and gender (especially masculinity) in texts primarily by Victorian and modernist writers. In the field of aging studies her work includes Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Fiction (2018) and an article on asynchronicity and aging queerly in the short fiction of... You do not currently have access to this content.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135984088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10342127
V. Joosen
Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock (1984) and Ali Smith's Autumn (2016) are two British novels that evoke an intense friendship between a girl and an older man. Their experimental narrative forms include a complex chronology, unreliable narrator, dream scenes, gaps, and a rich intertextual network to frame an intergenerational friendship that can be read as intergenerational desire. The experimental narratives and reflections on the fluidity of age enable Smith and Jones to evoke this controversial topic without fulling addressing it. A lot is at stake for Fire and Hemlock, given that it is addressed to young readers and there is concern that children's books could be used for grooming. Controversially, both novels locate the desire in the young girl rather than the old man and explore the agency and moments of disempowerment that the female characters experience. However, an age gap between childhood and adulthood is crucial in qualifying a relationship as “intergenerational desire,” and here, the novels’ experimental structures and fuzzy chronologies create ambiguity. In addition, the books create confusion about the nature of the attraction between the characters. They exploit the ambiguity that incomplete memories, unreliable narration, narrative gaps, metaphors, and intertextual references leave when thematizing what could be defined as friendship, kinship, love, and/or sexual attraction.
戴安娜·怀恩·琼斯（Diana Wynne Jones）的《火与海姆洛克》（Fire and Hemlock）（1984）和阿里·史密斯（Ali Smith）的《秋天》（Autumn。实验性的叙事和对年龄流动性的思考使史密斯和琼斯能够在没有完全解决这个有争议的话题的情况下唤起这个话题。《火与海姆洛克》面临着很大的风险，因为它是面向年轻读者的，而且人们担心儿童书籍可能会被用来打扮自己。有争议的是，这两部小说都将欲望定位在年轻女孩身上，而不是老人身上，并探讨了女性角色所经历的能动性和丧失权力的时刻。然而，童年和成年之间的年龄差距对于将一段关系定性为“代际欲望”至关重要，而在这里，小说的实验结构和模糊的年代造成了歧义。此外，这些书还混淆了人物之间吸引力的本质。他们利用了不完整的记忆、不可靠的叙述、叙事空白、隐喻和互文参考在对友谊、亲情、爱情和/或性吸引力进行主题化时留下的歧义。
{"title":"Holding Hands: Intergenerational Desire in Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock and Ali Smith's Autumn","authors":"V. Joosen","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10342127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10342127","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock (1984) and Ali Smith's Autumn (2016) are two British novels that evoke an intense friendship between a girl and an older man. Their experimental narrative forms include a complex chronology, unreliable narrator, dream scenes, gaps, and a rich intertextual network to frame an intergenerational friendship that can be read as intergenerational desire. The experimental narratives and reflections on the fluidity of age enable Smith and Jones to evoke this controversial topic without fulling addressing it. A lot is at stake for Fire and Hemlock, given that it is addressed to young readers and there is concern that children's books could be used for grooming. Controversially, both novels locate the desire in the young girl rather than the old man and explore the agency and moments of disempowerment that the female characters experience. However, an age gap between childhood and adulthood is crucial in qualifying a relationship as “intergenerational desire,” and here, the novels’ experimental structures and fuzzy chronologies create ambiguity. In addition, the books create confusion about the nature of the attraction between the characters. They exploit the ambiguity that incomplete memories, unreliable narration, narrative gaps, metaphors, and intertextual references leave when thematizing what could be defined as friendship, kinship, love, and/or sexual attraction.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42103093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10342197
A. Swinnen
Scholars in literary aging studies typically engage in oppositional readings that reveal the often-hidden age ideologies of texts while addressing points of exit from these ideologies. This form of research is ethical and political in that it aims to clarify cultural meanings of aging and how to negotiate and subvert them in a world characterized by structural and everyday ageism. Inspired by Rita Felski's plea not to go too far in our suspicion toward the hidden meanings of a text and to value uses of literature other than the strictly ideological, this article focuses on the figure of the older lay reader and their reading practices. It presents field work involving a 2017 reading and writing club of women over sixty who responded to the novella Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill (2006) by the Flemish author Dimitri Verhulst. Analyzing the reading diaries, group discussion, and creative writing exercises of the participants will show how these readers draw on both form and ideology when making sense of and coming to terms with the life and death of the main character, an eighty-two-year-old widow who descends from the hill to die and to follow her beloved to the grave.
{"title":"A Postcritical Approach to Literary Aging Studies: Older Women's Responses to Dimitri Verhulst's Novella Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill","authors":"A. Swinnen","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10342197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10342197","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Scholars in literary aging studies typically engage in oppositional readings that reveal the often-hidden age ideologies of texts while addressing points of exit from these ideologies. This form of research is ethical and political in that it aims to clarify cultural meanings of aging and how to negotiate and subvert them in a world characterized by structural and everyday ageism. Inspired by Rita Felski's plea not to go too far in our suspicion toward the hidden meanings of a text and to value uses of literature other than the strictly ideological, this article focuses on the figure of the older lay reader and their reading practices. It presents field work involving a 2017 reading and writing club of women over sixty who responded to the novella Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill (2006) by the Flemish author Dimitri Verhulst. Analyzing the reading diaries, group discussion, and creative writing exercises of the participants will show how these readers draw on both form and ideology when making sense of and coming to terms with the life and death of the main character, an eighty-two-year-old widow who descends from the hill to die and to follow her beloved to the grave.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43598078","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10342113
Jade French
Focusing on examples of Djuna Barnes's late published poetry—“Quarry” (1969), “Rite of Spring” (1982), and Creatures in an Alphabet (1982)—this article considers the contradictory ways these poems engage with theories of late style. Barnes's late output offers a unique and somewhat ambivalent case study for examining how the privileging of difficulty and discordance are met and informed by the lived realities of aging and longevity. Paying attention to the publication history of each poem, this article first examines Barnes's redrafting process for “Rite of Spring,” which has been recently reassessed as a conscious, avant-garde experiment, one this article suggests embraced lateness and continuation as a method. Second, the article considers “Quarry” and Barnes's correspondence with publishers Faber and Faber to examine her attitude toward a seemingly finalized poem. Third, this article turns to Creatures in an Alphabet as an example of a supposedly completed project that was left unendorsed by Barnes and the tensions inherent in trying to read a late style into its material. Overall, I suggest that the revisionary nature of Barnes's poetry and its unfinishing state is a late style process, which represents a formal experiment, a creative experience informed by aging, and an example of the cultural investment critics have made in her late works.
本文以Djuna Barnes晚期发表的诗歌为例——《采石场》(1969)、《春之祭》(1982)和《字母表中的生物》(1982)——探讨这些诗歌与晚期风格理论的矛盾之处。巴恩斯的晚期作品提供了一个独特而又有些矛盾的案例研究，用来研究困难和不和谐的特权是如何被老龄化和长寿的现实所满足和告知的。本文关注了每首诗的出版历史，首先考察了巴恩斯对《春之祭》(Rite of Spring)的改写过程。最近，人们将其重新评估为有意识的、前卫的实验，这篇文章认为，这是一种将迟延和延续作为一种方法的尝试。其次，本文考虑了《采石场》和巴恩斯与出版商费伯和费伯的通信，以考察她对这首看似定稿的诗的态度。第三，本文以《字母表中的生物》(Creatures in a Alphabet)为例，说明一个本应已完成的项目，却没有得到巴恩斯的认可，以及试图将一种晚期风格解读到其材料中所固有的紧张关系。总的来说，我认为巴恩斯诗歌的修正性质及其未完成状态是一种晚期风格过程，它代表了一种正式的实验，一种由年龄变化而产生的创造性体验，也是评论家对她晚期作品进行文化投资的一个例子。
{"title":"Contradictory Late Styles in Djuna Barnes's Poetic Cycles, 1969–82","authors":"Jade French","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10342113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10342113","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Focusing on examples of Djuna Barnes's late published poetry—“Quarry” (1969), “Rite of Spring” (1982), and Creatures in an Alphabet (1982)—this article considers the contradictory ways these poems engage with theories of late style. Barnes's late output offers a unique and somewhat ambivalent case study for examining how the privileging of difficulty and discordance are met and informed by the lived realities of aging and longevity. Paying attention to the publication history of each poem, this article first examines Barnes's redrafting process for “Rite of Spring,” which has been recently reassessed as a conscious, avant-garde experiment, one this article suggests embraced lateness and continuation as a method. Second, the article considers “Quarry” and Barnes's correspondence with publishers Faber and Faber to examine her attitude toward a seemingly finalized poem. Third, this article turns to Creatures in an Alphabet as an example of a supposedly completed project that was left unendorsed by Barnes and the tensions inherent in trying to read a late style into its material. Overall, I suggest that the revisionary nature of Barnes's poetry and its unfinishing state is a late style process, which represents a formal experiment, a creative experience informed by aging, and an example of the cultural investment critics have made in her late works.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43091583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10342225
Hailee Yoshizaki-Gibbons
Disability and aging are complex embodied, cultural, and social phenomena that are entangled throughout the life course. Despite this, there has been a dearth of scholarship that examines how disability and aging intersect (Yoshizaki-Gibbons 2018, 2021). Work that also includes sexuality is even more rare. Jane Gallop's succinct yet forceful book, Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus, is a notable exception. Gallop persuasively contradicts dominant narratives that old age and disability are solely experiences of decline and loss and instead argues that the bodily changes that come with old age and disablement may lead to new, exciting, and transformative experiences of sexuality.Gallop is well suited to engage in this exploration of sexuality over the life course, as she is building on a long genealogy of theoretical work on sexuality, ranging from her feminist denunciation of androcentric psychoanalytic concepts like phallus and castration, to her exploration of cultural negotiations over sexuality in pedagogical, academic spaces after she was accused of sexual harassment. In the introduction of her book, Gallop establishes the theoretical foundations of her work, which is strikingly interdisciplinary, drawing from feminist, queer, psychoanalytic, crip, and aging theory. She is particularly influenced by crip theory, which is a subversive and political lens that intertwines disability and queer theory to critique what queer crip scholar Robert McRuer (2006: 19) refers to as “able-bodied hegemony.” Gallop's theorizing is also deeply informed by aging studies scholar Margaret Morganroth Gullette's (1997) concept of “decline theory,” which examines how the life course is structured temporally as an arc, with middle and late life defined by decline, deterioration, and loss. Gallop seeks to build on this work by examining how aging—in and of itself a temporality—influences diverse sexual experiences and identities.To do so, Gallop reintroduces the psychoanalytic concepts of the phallus and castration, grappling with feminist and queer criticisms and their “sexist baggage,” while also acknowledging their potential in theorizing sexuality as “lived in and over time” (14–15). Gallop closes the introduction outlining her methodology for her work—what she has termed “anecdotal theory.” Anecdotal theory draws on personal narrative, thereby resisting the norms of academia and its fondness for general understanding. Indeed, throughout the text, Gallop draws on her lived experiences with late-onset disability and uses short, intimate stories to open each chapter. Given her focus on psychoanalysis, Gallop compares these stories to case histories, asserting that “theorizing must honor and answer to the detail of lived experience” (27). In addition, she interweaves literary analysis, social science research, and cultural critique to expand on her theorizations of late life sexualities.In the first chapter, “High Heels and Wheelcha
{"title":"Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus","authors":"Hailee Yoshizaki-Gibbons","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10342225","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10342225","url":null,"abstract":"Disability and aging are complex embodied, cultural, and social phenomena that are entangled throughout the life course. Despite this, there has been a dearth of scholarship that examines how disability and aging intersect (Yoshizaki-Gibbons 2018, 2021). Work that also includes sexuality is even more rare. Jane Gallop's succinct yet forceful book, Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus, is a notable exception. Gallop persuasively contradicts dominant narratives that old age and disability are solely experiences of decline and loss and instead argues that the bodily changes that come with old age and disablement may lead to new, exciting, and transformative experiences of sexuality.Gallop is well suited to engage in this exploration of sexuality over the life course, as she is building on a long genealogy of theoretical work on sexuality, ranging from her feminist denunciation of androcentric psychoanalytic concepts like phallus and castration, to her exploration of cultural negotiations over sexuality in pedagogical, academic spaces after she was accused of sexual harassment. In the introduction of her book, Gallop establishes the theoretical foundations of her work, which is strikingly interdisciplinary, drawing from feminist, queer, psychoanalytic, crip, and aging theory. She is particularly influenced by crip theory, which is a subversive and political lens that intertwines disability and queer theory to critique what queer crip scholar Robert McRuer (2006: 19) refers to as “able-bodied hegemony.” Gallop's theorizing is also deeply informed by aging studies scholar Margaret Morganroth Gullette's (1997) concept of “decline theory,” which examines how the life course is structured temporally as an arc, with middle and late life defined by decline, deterioration, and loss. Gallop seeks to build on this work by examining how aging—in and of itself a temporality—influences diverse sexual experiences and identities.To do so, Gallop reintroduces the psychoanalytic concepts of the phallus and castration, grappling with feminist and queer criticisms and their “sexist baggage,” while also acknowledging their potential in theorizing sexuality as “lived in and over time” (14–15). Gallop closes the introduction outlining her methodology for her work—what she has termed “anecdotal theory.” Anecdotal theory draws on personal narrative, thereby resisting the norms of academia and its fondness for general understanding. Indeed, throughout the text, Gallop draws on her lived experiences with late-onset disability and uses short, intimate stories to open each chapter. Given her focus on psychoanalysis, Gallop compares these stories to case histories, asserting that “theorizing must honor and answer to the detail of lived experience” (27). In addition, she interweaves literary analysis, social science research, and cultural critique to expand on her theorizations of late life sexualities.In the first chapter, “High Heels and Wheelcha","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135983792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10342085
Anita Wohlmann
Stereotypes and clichés about older age typically evoke criticism and resistance. Rightly so, given that they simplify, overgeneralize, distort, and limit. This article treats stereotypes and clichés as forms that can indeed have powerful and harmful meanings; however, it claims that a focus on content may overlook some of the surprising and unpredictable affordances these forms can also have: stereotypes can help order experience, offer guidelines for behavior, describe relationships, and provide solace and comfort. The article uses Philip Roth's novel Everyman as a particularly rich test case in which stereotypes and clichés abound: a grumpy and “dirty” old man sees in aging nothing but decline, tragedy, and an accumulation of illnesses—associations that age scholars have challenged for decades. These stereotypes, however, also have less predictable affordances, especially when they are conspicuously repeated and amplified via literary strategies. Rather than claiming that these strategies undermine and challenge the problematic nature of age stereotypes and clichés, this article aims to broaden the repertoire of critical approaches to these forms.
{"title":"So Typical! Philip Roth's Age Stereotypes","authors":"Anita Wohlmann","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10342085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10342085","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Stereotypes and clichés about older age typically evoke criticism and resistance. Rightly so, given that they simplify, overgeneralize, distort, and limit. This article treats stereotypes and clichés as forms that can indeed have powerful and harmful meanings; however, it claims that a focus on content may overlook some of the surprising and unpredictable affordances these forms can also have: stereotypes can help order experience, offer guidelines for behavior, describe relationships, and provide solace and comfort. The article uses Philip Roth's novel Everyman as a particularly rich test case in which stereotypes and clichés abound: a grumpy and “dirty” old man sees in aging nothing but decline, tragedy, and an accumulation of illnesses—associations that age scholars have challenged for decades. These stereotypes, however, also have less predictable affordances, especially when they are conspicuously repeated and amplified via literary strategies. Rather than claiming that these strategies undermine and challenge the problematic nature of age stereotypes and clichés, this article aims to broaden the repertoire of critical approaches to these forms.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41586768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10342057
Pieter Vermeulen
The fictional representation of the cognitive experience of people with dementia is often credited with providing an occasion for readerly empathy and a privileged mimetic account of dementia experience. This essay draws on recent scholarship by Caroline Levine and Anna Kornbluh that expands the notion of form to include infrastructures, institutions, and other entities that provide sustenance and continuity to offer a different account of the cultural work such fictions do. The essay argues that two canonical works of fiction about dementia— J. Bernlef's Out of Mind and B. S. Johnson's House Mother Normal—do not merely offer a mimesis of dementia experience (the focus of existing research). These works take seriously dementia experience's challenge to formal coherence as they (however ambivalently) displace the task of providing continuity and sustenance to caring institutions rather than to residual ratiocinative capacities. Both novels repurpose the ellipses and blanks that are typical of the representation of dementia “mind styles” for something other than an indication of deficient subjectivity: in Bernlef, they become an indicator of lyrical and timeless sustenance and suspension; in Johnson, they point to regularities that invite the reader to coconstruct an imaginative space that sustains the lives the novel evokes.
{"title":"Infrastructures of Aging: Form and Institutional Care in Dementia Fiction","authors":"Pieter Vermeulen","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10342057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10342057","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The fictional representation of the cognitive experience of people with dementia is often credited with providing an occasion for readerly empathy and a privileged mimetic account of dementia experience. This essay draws on recent scholarship by Caroline Levine and Anna Kornbluh that expands the notion of form to include infrastructures, institutions, and other entities that provide sustenance and continuity to offer a different account of the cultural work such fictions do. The essay argues that two canonical works of fiction about dementia— J. Bernlef's Out of Mind and B. S. Johnson's House Mother Normal—do not merely offer a mimesis of dementia experience (the focus of existing research). These works take seriously dementia experience's challenge to formal coherence as they (however ambivalently) displace the task of providing continuity and sustenance to caring institutions rather than to residual ratiocinative capacities. Both novels repurpose the ellipses and blanks that are typical of the representation of dementia “mind styles” for something other than an indication of deficient subjectivity: in Bernlef, they become an indicator of lyrical and timeless sustenance and suspension; in Johnson, they point to regularities that invite the reader to coconstruct an imaginative space that sustains the lives the novel evokes.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45856149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10342043
Jacob Jewusiak
{"title":"Introduction: Forms of Aging","authors":"Jacob Jewusiak","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10342043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10342043","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66134011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10342169
D. Dufournaud
If speed is a cornerstone of contemporary life, then one of the most difficult hurdles to overcome in the fight against agism is the fact that senescence entails a slowing down of the human body and mind. The question this essay asks is whether this form of life can afford epistemological and moral benefits within a productivist culture of speed that stigmatizes slowness and inactivity. In order to pursue an answer to this question, the essay turns to what critics have begun to call “slow cinema” and examines two films about people suffering from senescence-related slowness: Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) and Lee Chang-dong's Poetry (2010). The essay treats the slowness that can accompany age as an experiential form and places it on the same plane of formalist inquiry as slow cinema, an aesthetic form characterized by a decelerated pace, long takes, minimalist editing, and an emphasis on the temporality of quotidian life. The essay establishes its methodological approach by bringing Caroline Levine's formalism into conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and André Bazin's writings on cinematic realism. Ultimately, the essay contends that Ozu's and Lee's films associate the value of slowing down our thinking and expanding our attention spans with the perceptual potentialities of age-related slowness within a culture of speed.
{"title":"Cinema of Senescence: Old Age, Slow Cinema, and Form","authors":"D. Dufournaud","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10342169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10342169","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 If speed is a cornerstone of contemporary life, then one of the most difficult hurdles to overcome in the fight against agism is the fact that senescence entails a slowing down of the human body and mind. The question this essay asks is whether this form of life can afford epistemological and moral benefits within a productivist culture of speed that stigmatizes slowness and inactivity. In order to pursue an answer to this question, the essay turns to what critics have begun to call “slow cinema” and examines two films about people suffering from senescence-related slowness: Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) and Lee Chang-dong's Poetry (2010). The essay treats the slowness that can accompany age as an experiential form and places it on the same plane of formalist inquiry as slow cinema, an aesthetic form characterized by a decelerated pace, long takes, minimalist editing, and an emphasis on the temporality of quotidian life. The essay establishes its methodological approach by bringing Caroline Levine's formalism into conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and André Bazin's writings on cinematic realism. Ultimately, the essay contends that Ozu's and Lee's films associate the value of slowing down our thinking and expanding our attention spans with the perceptual potentialities of age-related slowness within a culture of speed.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46349906","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：