Perpetual Adolescence in Literature and Film

Serializing Age

Serialized storytelling provides intriguing opportunities for critical representations of age and aging. In contrast to the finite character of films, television narratives can unfold across hundreds of episodes and multiple seasons. Contemporary viewing practices and new media technologies have resulted in complex television narratives, in which experimental temporalities and revisions of narrative linearity and chronological time have become key features. As the first of its kind, this volume investigates how TV series as a powerful cultural medium shape representations of age and aging, such as in »Orange Is The New Black«, »The Wire« or »Desperate Housewives«, to understand what it mean…

Approaches to (Auto)biography from History, Sociology, Media, and Literary Studies in Two German Publications

The interdisciplinary approaches that are suggested in the two German studies reviewed here certainly advance the notion, as Thomas Etzemuller notes, that biography is a surprisingly complex genre....

Of Termites and Ovaries on Strike: Rethinking Medical Metaphors of the Female Body

AbstractThis article explores how problematic or detrimental metaphors of the female body can be reimagined. Metaphors that compare the body to a machine or factory influence the ways in which wome...

To Be Continued: Serial Narration, Chronic Disease, and Disability.

This article explores the representation of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's disease in the television series The Good Wife and The Michael J. Fox Show. We suggest that serial narration offers intriguing ways to rethink the function and meaning of narratives in health contexts, and that the episodic narrative form of television series may afford insights into the structure of medical encounters. Specifically, we examine to what extent serial narration, with its focus on continuity and repetition, might help reimagine the typical narrative of decline, which is implicit in the terminology of neurodegeneration, as well as the narrative of (premature) closure or finitude that often accompanies a di…

Living autobiographically: Concepts of aging and artistic expression in painting and modern dance.

This article discusses the ways in which artists have incorporated or failed to incorporate the aging process of their bodies into their art. Using Russian ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and the French painter Claude Monet as cases in point, we explore situations in which physical changes brought about by aging compromises artists' ability to engage with their artistic medium. Connecting Monet's oeuvre and Baryshnikov's dance performances to life writing accounts, we draw on John Paul Eakin's concept of "living autobiographically": In this vein, life writing research does not only have to take into account concepts of identity as they emerge from life writing narratives, but it also need…

Illness Narrative and Self-Help Culture – Self-Help Writing on Age-Related Infertility

Both self-help books and illness narratives are motivated by an impulse to overcome a crisis and, simultaneously, to help others who suffer from similar conditions. In doing so, authors of self-help and illness narratives move in between polar opposites: they have both individual and collective motives, they have a desire to overcome uncertainty and achieve control and they negotiate the authority of experience versus the authority of expertise. This paper has two objectives: (1) It describes the intersections of illness life writing and self-help culture and traces the thematic, cultural and historical similarities. (2) It analyzes a selection of four autobiographical, U.S.-American self-h…

Teenage nostalgia

Rewinding Frankenstein and the body-machine: organ transplantation in the dystopian young adult fiction seriesUnwind

While the separation of body and mind (and the entailing metaphor of the body as a machine) has been a cornerstone of Western medicine for a long time, reactions to organ transplantation among others challenge this clear-cut dichotomy. The limits of the machine-body have been negotiated in science fiction, most canonically in Mary Shelley9s Frankenstein (1818). Since then, Frankenstein9s monster itself has become a motif that permeates both medical and fictional discourses. Neal Shusterman9s contemporary dystology for young adults, Unwind , draws on traditional concepts of the machine-body and the Frankenstein myth. This article follows one of the young protagonists in the series, who is en…

“I Am Because You Are:” Relationality in the Works of Siri Hustvedt

Let the countdown begin — Aging experiences of young adults in countdown blogs

Abstract This paper examines a particular blog phenomenon that has not yet received much attention: Countdown blogs which are written before a significant birthday (in this paper, it is the thirtieth birthday). The bloggers fill the remaining time, often a year, with the accomplishment of particular tasks, reflections on their lives or photo projects. In their blogs, the young adults demonstrate an age awareness that is often overlooked in aging studies. The paper argues that young adults use countdown blogs to cope with their aging experiences and, in doing so, they apply a particular economic rhetoric and emerge as entrepreneurs of themselves – an identity concept that Foucault presented …