Tag Archives: literature

Overcoming decline (in) narrative

My contribution to the Literature and Medicine collection by Anna Elsner and Monika Pietrzak-Franger, ‘Overcoming decline (in) narrative: Episodicity in dementia and ageing’, explores how the culturally and medically prized concept of narrative influences pessimism about ageing. The chapter takes three steps. It reviews seminal texts in the Medical Humanities to illustrate how signature characteristics of narrative dominate cultural and medical expectations of how people experience themselves and think about their lives. Taking dementia as a situation where anxieties about ageing and continuity of self are particularly acute, it illustrates the pressure emanating from narrativity for life as lived and life as narrated, revealing episodicity as a viable response to this two-fold pressure. In looking at the life histories of older people, gathered by in-depth unstructured interviews and published in book-format, this contribution demonstrates that episodicity is hugely relevant also for how older people retrospectively pitch their lives, suggesting that mid-life anxieties about living along a prescribed narrative arc into old age are perhaps exaggerated.

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.

Annie Ernaux in the Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing

Delighted to learn that Annie Ernaux has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2022 ‘for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraint of personal memory’. I discuss Ernaux’s writing about her mother with dementia in my first book, The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing (2017). The book is free to download thanks to Wellcome Trust funded open access.

Literature and Dementia Care

The title of the plenary lecture I delivered at the Symposium on Ethics, Agency, and Personhood in Dementia at the University of Southern Denmark, Copenhagen, in August 2022, reflecting on how particular genres, narrative perspectives and tropes may or may not be productive for an enabling approach to the person with dementia and their care. Great to join Marlene Goldman, Ina Kjogx Pedersen and Peter Simonsen for a panel discussion, moderated by Cindie Maagaard, on the use of narrative medicine in dementia care.

From a ‘care-free’ distance?

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.

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.