Literary Gerontology: How Older Characters in Contemporary Russian Literature Confront and Articulate Personal and Public Spaces, Boundaries, and Thresholds

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel continues to employ literary gerontology, still a relatively new field of scholarship, to analyze constructions of aging in Russian culture ad society, this year with a nod to Gaston Bachelard's "Poetics of Space." In particular, we pay attention to his opening chapter interrogating the meaning of interior domestic spaces received through the subjective consciousness. Bachelard examines interior locations as places of intimacy and memory manifested in poetry, allowing the contemplation of the intimacy of inner mental space. He also speaks of thought, daydreaming and dreaming invoked by the house.

Our panel confronts and articulates a variety of literary responses to, and perceptions of, personal and public interior and exterior spaces, boundaries and thresholds--both mental and physical--by the older inhabitants of contemporary Russian literature expressed through a variety of styles and genres.

Sub Unit

• Literature: Russian and Eurasian

Chair

• Anna Muza, UC Berkeley

Papers

• Confronting and Contemplating Space, Boundaries, and Thresholds through the Eyes of Liudmila Petrushevskaia's Older Characters in a Short Story, Novella, and Drama - Jane Gary Harris, U of Pittsburgh

• Poetics of Space as Articulation of Old Age Senility in Russian Contemporary Short Prose - Maija Könönen, U of Helsinki / U of Eastern Finland (Finland)

• Still Alice, Still Elena: Novels, Clinical Work, Dementia - Jehanne M Gheith, Duke U

Discussant

• Elizabeth Ann Skomp, Stetson U