A book chapter on how adult sons perceive of themselves as they confront their parent’s older age and memory loss, reading Michele Farina’s Quando andiamo a casa? (2015), Jonathan Taylor’s Take Me Home (2007) and Nick Taylor’s A Necessary End (1994). In the open access essay collection Ageing Masculinities, Alzheimer’s and Dementia Narratives (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), edited by Heike Hartung, Rüdiger Kunow and Matthew Sweney.
Tag Archives: dementia
Dementia and the Politics of Memory in Fiction
A book chapter on Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia and their deployment in fiction: from narrative experiment to the patient as plot device. In: The Politics of Dementia: Forgetting and Remembering the Violent Past in Literature, Film and Graphic Narratives (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2022 – open access), edited by Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff, Nina Schmidt and Sue Vice.
A conversation on ageing
…together with Sridhar Venkatapuram (Global Health Institute, King’s College London), in a series of cross-college seminars hosted by the Centre for Humanities and Health, King’s College London.
Interdependent narratives: dementia in science, medicine and literature of the long 20th century
A keynote delivered at Amnesie d’autore: 1920-2020, un secolo di parole per raccontare l’amnesia, an international conference about memory loss at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy, 23-25 September 2021.
Review of The Diseased Brain and the Failing Mind
Review by Matthew Broome, chair in psychiatry and youth mental health, and director of the Institute for Mental Health, at the University of Birmingham, in Times Higher Education.
Informal Dementia Care: COVID-19, burning glass on the divide between policy and practice
An intervention in the framework of Thinking in Crisis Times, a collective exploration by the KCL English Department, to situate the ongoing care crisis within the wider context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tools of Care
Giving a presentation on the ‘Tools of Care in the Dementia Detective Novel’ at the Ageing, Illness, Care in Cultural and Literary Narrative conference at the University of Huddersfield, September 5-6, 2019.
Conversations on Care and/in the Community
Delighted to have contributed to conversations on Care and/in the Community at Birkbeck in June 2019. For Leah Sidi’s account of the workshop surrounding twenty-first century social and spatial conditions of care, see her post on The Polyphony.
Working Together. Changing Care.
Follow this link to read my reflections on the Dementia, Narrative and Culture Network workshop Working Together, held in Senate House London, 23rd November 2018; published on The Polyphony site, a space for Conversations across the Medical Humanities hosted by Durham University. The post also refers to an interview I conducted with my local project partner, Tony Britton, who launched the Pam Britton Trust for Dementia in Warwickshire (click here for the full interview, hosted on the Trust’s What’s New page).
Creativity in Later Life
Delighted to have been part of the interdisciplinary team that produced Creativity in Later Life: Beyond Late Style (Routledge, 2019), edited by David Amigoni and Gordon McMullan. My contribution explores Terry Pratchett’s documentary ‘Living with Alzheimer’s’, and resists the idea that dementia patients lose their creativity. Among other things, I see creativity expressed in the ways in which patients negotiate with science and scientific discourse related to dementia.
Martina Zimmermann 