Delighted to have been invited to speak in the Winter Series: Medical and Digital Humanities of the Literature and Science Forum – about a narrative approach to changing how we think about ageing.
Tag Archives: life writing
Writing successful ageing?
My contribution to the Bloomsbury Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film (Bloomsbury, 2023; edited by Sarah Falcus, Heike Hartung and Raquel Medina) explores the connection between ageing and illness. ‘Writing successful ageing? The aches and pains of illness narrative and life review’ analyses how the expectations for older people created by the concept of successful ageing reveal themselves in prominent life writing. The chapter looks at the role of illness in older age in directing self-perceptions and self-representations of ageing as failure. It also considers different narrative forms and frames in life writing, the diary as compared to the life review, and their possibilities and limitations in articulating ageing as successful.
Life Narratives and the Biological Reality of Ageing
In March 2023, I was invited to deliver a seminar at Trinity College Dublin. The hybrid seminar was part of the Medical and Health Humanities Seminar Series in association with Trinity Long Room Hub. It examined the role of illness in older age in directing self-perceptions and self-representations of ageing as failure, and considered different forms of life narratives and their possibilities and limitations in articulating ageing as a biological reality. You can listen to a podcast of the seminar following this link.
Martina Zimmermann 