Detailed Table of Contents
- Editorial
- Abstract: The notion of ageing within western culture is informed by highly ambivalent associations. While on the one hand old age seemingly speaks of a mature and accomplished self awareness, warranting a stabilised identity through the accumulation of experience and memory, age on the other hand is linked to the fears of fading health, the gradual reduction of physical capability and ultimately death. The assumed dwindling of one's "sex appeal" and sexual desire additionally marks this stage of life as a noteworthy perspective, from which to look at prevailing ideas of gender and sexual identity.
- Roberta Maierhofer: Generations Connecting: Alzheimer's Disease and Changes of Cultural Values
- Abstract: The emphasis of American culture on the autonomous and independent individual, and on the search for identity in opposition to defined cultural and societal rules, can be seen as a value that is undergoing rapid change. In American Studies, the quest of the individual for a self-determined life in opposition to the norms of society has often been defined as the central cultural narrative, in which the desire of the individual to seek and define an identity within or without the community is the driving force of the plot. In feminist literature, more specifically, the search for a single, private self has often been linked to the daughter’s relationship to her mother within the family structure. However, this quest for identity takes on different forms when the daughter is confronted with a mother whose identity, due to Alzheimer’s disease, is no longer discernable, and whose memory of whom she is and was has vanished. This loss of memory concerning not only everyday incidents but also one’s very relation to others marks a starting point of a new definition of self in relation to others and reverses a mother-daughter to a daughter-mother relationship.
- Author's Bio: Roberta Maierhofer is Professor at the American Studies Institute, University of Graz, and has been Vice Rector of the University for International Relations since 1999. She has published widely on American Literature and Cultural Studies, Feminist Literature and Research, Documentary Film, Cross Cultural Studies and Aging Studies. Her focus in research and teaching is, among other things, on American literature and cultural history, gerontology and female literature.
- David Vella: The Houellebecq Cure. All Malady Will End in the Neohuman
- Abstract: Michel Houellebecq’s characters frequently suffer from an obsessive thought of death: an insufferable torment undergone especially by ageing individuals. The genetically modified human clone, the neohuman, and his regime, are especially designed to at once eradicate this obsession through immortality and apprehend it through intellectual and scientific lucidity. Paradoxically however, it is seen to return and disrupt also this existential state. Focusing on Maurice Blanchot’s question of the secret, ‘The Houellebecq Cure’ seeks to more closely define this obsession that is pivotal to Houellebecq’s tragic scenarios. Moreover, it traces out the significant interaction between the thought and the “irrational” drives of love and carnality. In this light, it argues that the failure of the neohuman predicament hinges on a suppression of these drives. Its impassive detachment is seen to be similar to the existential state of the ageing human. What this points to is ultimately the futility of all efforts of subjectivity at mastering an anguish that comes from what is exterior to it; an anguish that, in truth, constitutes it.
- Author's Bio: David Vella is a postgraduate student with Cardiff University’s Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory. He is writing his Ph.D., Narrow Gates, Strait Ways, on a comparative analysis of the postmodern sacred and the phenomenology of the icon. His research interests include existentialism, phenomenology, G.W.F. Hegel, poststructuralist and postmodernist theory, fin-de-sičcle and contemporary decadence literature, and medieval mysticism.
- Aagje Swinnen: Never Too Old To Learn or Rebel. Two Old Ladies (Twee oude vrouwtjes)
- Abstract: This article studies the literary representation of age and gender in Two Old Ladies, a short story composite written by the Dutch author Toon Tellegen. First, it investigates how Two Old Ladies refers to the narrative structure of the fairy tale and its stereotypical depiction of old women as antagonistic hags or helpful grannies. A referential reading method is substituted for a poetic one in order to arrive at a better understanding of Tellegen’s fiction. Second, the analysis focuses on the conventions of the grotesque as an art form that resists dominant modes of representation and interpretation. Also, in the theories of the grotesque, the body of an old woman often functions as the prototypical grotesque body. Third, the genre characteristics of the short story composite serve to illuminate the dialogical encounter between Tellegen’s different stories. The closure of every single story gets undermined by the act of collecting them. The form of the short story composite turns out to be compatible with theories of performativity. In the article, important insights of gender and age studies are called on to deepen the understanding of Tellegen’s critical practice as a writer in Two Old Ladies.
- Author's Bio: Aagje Swinnen wrote her PhD dissertation on the “female” Bildungsroman in modern Dutch literature (Het slot ontvlucht, Amsterdam UP, 2006) at the Department of Dutch Literature and Literary Theory at Ghent University (Belgium). She is currently working as Assistant Professor at the Department of Literature and Art (Centre for Gender and Diversity) at Maastricht University (Netherlands) with a VENI scholarship awarded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Swinnen publishes on the cultural representation of aging and old age, the relation between narratology and narrative gerontology, gender and age studies, and a disability studies’ perspective on dementia. Swinnen is a founder member of the European Network in Aging Studies (ENAS) and leader of the NWO-funded international project ‘Live to Be a Hundred: Cultural Narratives of Longevity.’
- Anthony Todd (Review): Srole, Carole. “Transcribing Class and Gender: Masculinity and Femininity in Nineteenth- century Courts and Offices”.
- Sarah Imhoff (Review): Roden, Frederick (ed.). “Jewish/Christian/Queer: Crossroads and Identities. Queer Interventions.”