João Paulo Guimarães | Universidade do Porto (original) (raw)
Peer-Reviewed Publications by João Paulo Guimarães
Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities, 2023
In her last novella, The Hour of the Star, Lispector makes plain that the brilliance of life-any ... more In her last novella, The Hour of the Star, Lispector makes plain that the brilliance of life-any life whatever-lies in its capacity to endlessly contemplate itself and that as such it is inseparable from its mode of contemplation. As we will suggest in this article, Lispector's view of life as living contemplation resonates with Giorgio Agamben's conception of being as potentiality. In the last installment of his Homo Sacer series, The Use of Bodies, Agamben tries to offer an alternative paradigm of life to that of Western biopolitics, whose power operates on its separation of bare life from forms of life. Central to this new ontology is Agamben's notion of a life as inseparable from its mode or form, as he highlights using a hyphen: form-of-life. By form-of-life, Agamben means that one's living is never reducible to the biological or economic facts of existence because it essentially concerns itself with its potentialities, its singular modes of being. Life that contemplates itself is a life which simply is without being reducible to its function. In The Hour of the Star, Lispector's heroine, Macabéa is not simply a figure of bare life as some critics have suggested by reducing her life to her factual circumstances. She is rather a figure whose life is affected by its own sensation of existing-its unborn possibilities.
Poetics Today, 2023
This essay explores Ron Silliman's Universe, a serial poetic project which, according to the publ... more This essay explores Ron Silliman's Universe, a serial poetic project which, according to the publisher's description, "were [the author] to live long enough, would take him three centuries to complete". The article specifically focuses on the significance of the book's length for a general discussion of aging, poetry and temporality. One should bear in mind that Universe is not a retrospective work of synthesis but rather a present and future-oriented project. The point of departure for the article's analysis will be the following passage from Northern Soul, the second book in the series: "Page 43 / you will read / differently if / there are 94 to the book / than if there are just / 45, What about / 523 what then / little hen".
English Studies , 2023
This article discusses American poet Steven Zultanski’s 2014 Bribery, a book of post-conceptual p... more This article discusses American poet Steven Zultanski’s 2014 Bribery, a book of post-conceptual poetry which unfolds as a quest for authenticity, the aim being to address the sense of impasse and guilt that, according to the book’s speaker, are prevalent among the people of America, depicted throughout the book as the nexus of global evil. For Bribery’s speaker, we argue, authenticity is necessary to begin again and to circumvent neoliberalism’s individualising tendencies, which make his efforts to change the status quo feel futile. Similarly to earlier American writers like Franklin or Thoreau, self-development, for Bribery’s speaker, becomes a route towards precision and humility, a way to reimagine his community without elevating himself and resorting to easy moralism. Bribery is also an experimental project that works methodically to generate something precise and surprising without relying on randomness and abstraction.
CounterText (Edinburgh University Press) , 2022
Despite the fact that Bruce Andrews’s interests cut across different aesthetic media, concepts fr... more Despite the fact that Bruce Andrews’s interests cut across different aesthetic media, concepts from music, dance and film many times determining the formal and conceptual contours of his compositions, scholars most often read them as bona fide works of poetry. In this essay, we will attend to and flesh out the significance of Andrews’s dialogue with the medium of cinema in two chronologically distant works: Film Noir (1978) and Swoon Noir (2007). I will contend that while Andrews uses the noir, in the first book, to attack the sensorially disabling nature of immersive art, in the second one, the famed pulp genre functions as a grand metaphor through which the poet addresses the ineffectiveness of intentionally non-immersive avant-garde works, like his own 1978 piece, to carry out a much-promised perceptual and ethical awakening. The postulation and presentation of infinite ways of experiencing reality may be, Andrews suggests, conceptually gratifying but it nevertheless leads to an aesthetic blind alley. In the same way that defeatist characters in noir films appeal to the ubiquity of evil and the clout of contingency to exculpate themselves from not attempting to change their fates and the fate of the world, it is, according to Andrews, possible that shock-and-awe innovative works inadvertently and paradoxically make audiences nestle in and become comfortable with uncertainty. There is a risk that viewers and readers take for granted that there are innumerable ways of perceiving reality without actually going through the trouble of engaging with the specific and transformative modes of sensing offered by innovative works. Maybe art’s dramatization of the world’s complexity and variety can too easily be reduced to a style, a catch-all method that ends up making one-dimensional the very domains that it attempts to open up for investigation. In this sense, there is, perhaps, in Andrews’s view, an escapist element, very much like that which colours most detective pulp fiction and cinema, in innovative works that purport to be forward-thinking and transformative but end up promoting a feel-good mood of powerless rapture and amazement. In this piece, we fully flesh out Andrews’s critique of the vanguard’s “cinematic” ambitions and assess the alternative “miniature” aesthetics he proposes. Only by drawing out and bringing its innovations into focus, Andrews claims, will the avant-garde be able to rescue the transformative modes of experience it reveals from their dilution in sublime-soaked pulp poetics.
Nordic Journal of English Studies (University of Oslo Press) , 2018
In Beauport, Kate Colby poses the question of whether the fictions that orient our daily lives ar... more In Beauport, Kate Colby poses the question of whether the fictions that orient our daily lives are necessarily less real, natural and true than the more visceral, complex and historically subtle world revealed by experimental poetry. Colby provocatively revisits and re-evaluates the bourgeois spheres of domesticity, tourism and memorabilia, often dismissed in vanguardist circles for suggesting inauthenticity, ignorance and conservatism. Although never directly referencing Williams, Olson or the Language poets by name, numerous passages in Beauport make it clear that Colby wishes to chime in on their conversation about poetry and realism. As a guide to her investigation, poet enlists the aid of Henry Davis Sleeper, an antiquarian who rose to prominence with the life-long construction of “Beauport” in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a castle he used to house and display his immense collection of bric-à-brac. With a luxurious arrangement of decorative floral shapes as its cover image, Colby’s Beauport hazards the idea that the clichéd designs common to consumer culture and antiquarianism can promote intimacies of a deeper and more genuine kind than those traditionally fostered by experimental poets, affinities which the latter, driven by a desire to enlighten and mobilize their audience, have snootily left untapped. With its exploration of the unthinking stasis that consumer products promote and antiquities materialize, the question Colby’s book wishes to ask us is: what if, instead of waking us up, poetry’s goal was to lull us to sleep?
Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos (Universidad de Sevilla) , 2018
According to Henry Corbin, in Islamic philosophy, “divine language" is seen as an inexhaustible c... more According to Henry Corbin, in Islamic philosophy, “divine language" is seen as an inexhaustible creative power that ensures nature’s ever-changing configuration. In this essay, I claim that American poet Kazim Ali’s compositions show us that there is continuity between divine, natural and poetic language and that it is through the verbal acts of his creatures that God’s scripture goes on writing itself. Ali’s work is thus in line with Islam’s “lettristic” tradition, which shows us the religion allows room for the kind of broad-minded views about natural diversity and sexuality that some critics accuse the West of smuggling into Islamic countries.
Western American Literature (University of Nebraska Press), 2016
In this paper, I reassess the typographical and grammatical play in Ed Dorn's Gunslinger, arguing... more In this paper, I reassess the typographical and grammatical play in Ed Dorn's Gunslinger, arguing that the composition’s meandering form articulates an environmental discourse that has not yet received any critical attention. Prominent poetry scholar Marjorie Perloff summarizes most extant critical readings of the book when she notes that “Slinger is perhaps best understood as a poetic Sourcebook on postmodern discourses” (xvii) and that “the real thrust of Slinger [is] its elaborate dismantling and deconstruction of our linguistic and poetic habits” (xv). While I do not disagree with these ideas (and, in fact, build upon them in my own argument), I argue that Dorn’s linguistic experimentation is indissociable from his take on bioethics, a topic he was studying at the time he was writing the book. My claim is that Gunslinger attempts to valorize the production of deviant particulars in nature in the face of its homogenization at the hands of cybernetic capitalism and the translation of all things into the universal language of information. Instead of trying to represent specific natural forms and militantly defend them through its narrative, the book establishes a parallel between the way nature playfully creates anomalous beings and the way language spontaneously suspends its communicative functions to intimate and animate aimless and humorously deviant combinations of letters and words. Gunslinger thereby re-energizes, I claim, an old idea of nature as a free-spirited maker of useless forms. This notion was, according to historians of science Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, eschewed by Enlightenment thinkers, who founded modern science on the premise that nature was a passive medium for the inscription of God’s timeless and universal laws. In making all things comparable, modern science set the stage for cybernetics and information theory, which Dorn attacks in his poem. Gunslinger essays, I will argue, an ecological poetics of noise and interference, its language positioning itself, with its humorous quirks, in the way of universal translatability, calling attention, in the process, to the unassimilable particularity of all material things. In a comedic manner, Gunslinger thus highlights the importance of resisting abstractions and functional directives for the elaboration of an environmental discourse that stays true to the material world’s ebullient messiness.
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies (Penn State UP), 2018
In this essay, I will show that, tactfully aware of the artificiality of the gender norms that in... more In this essay, I will show that, tactfully aware of the artificiality of the gender norms that inform the algorithms of desire and devilish violence of the blues, Captain Beefheart makes purposed use of that genre’s simplistic sexual logic as a means to explore the more demonic territory nature “in-itself”, a conceptual space predicated on the negation of masculinist and anthropocentric discourses of control. Unlike the Lovecraftian heroes that traditionally investigate the in-human, Beefheart does not recoil in terror before its darkness, performing, rather, a masochistically ludic exploration of the human-nature gap, the reconsideration of which remains an ecological imperative.
Anglo Saxonica (University of Lisbon Press), 2015
Drafts by João Paulo Guimarães
Book Reviews by João Paulo Guimarães
Full Stop, 2019
It is easy to see why a study like Martrich’s, in spite of its eccentric and tongue-in-cheek topi... more It is easy to see why a study like Martrich’s, in spite of its eccentric and tongue-in-cheek topic of inquiry, could be understood as a welcome meditation on the present moment, marked, as we know, by a tension (never directly mentioned throughout the book) between the counter-factual politics of the right and the left’s crusade for the restoration of reason. Martrich’s decision to focus on a series of anachronistic figures whose culturally insensitive and hypermasculine ethos might be seen as pathetic and grotesque is not accidental. The author makes plain that a strong belief in ideas that are widely seen as ridiculous and retrograde is above all a sign of vulnerability. Perceiving themselves and their world to be under attack, conservatives double down on their beliefs. Their inflamed posture is as much the product of left-wing tactics (the will to speedily obliterate any trace of conservatism) and its relative success than of actual right-wing vigor.
Public Talks by João Paulo Guimarães
Ballymun Library/Bealtaine Festival (Dublin) , 2019
The talk will open with a discussion of a set of poems from Lyn Hejinian's The Unfollowing, which... more The talk will open with a discussion of a set of poems from Lyn Hejinian's The Unfollowing, which puts a positive spin on the association of old age with childhood. a trope that is often deployed to infantilize and disenfranchize older people. By contrast, Hejinian uses it to highlight life's openness and contigency. Taking a cue from the poet, I will mobilize the notion of "the old child" to explore questions like: do we get less creative as we age? Are we born with certain talents and/or do we keep acquiring and developing them later in life? What obstacles get in the way of the expression of our multiple valences as we get older? We will survey the latest research on the epigenetic development of giftedness across the life span, dwell on the lives of exemplary polymaths and late bloomers and discuss how these matters relate to the topics of labor division, meritocracy and leisure.
Book Chapters by João Paulo Guimarães
Ageing Masculinities, Alzheimer's and Dementia Narratives (Heike Hartung, Rüdiger Kunow and Matthew Sweney, Eds.), 2021
To what extent can one's attitude toward life help mitigate the impact of dementia? In Uncle Fall... more To what extent can one's attitude toward life help mitigate the impact of dementia? In Uncle Falling, Canadian poet Anne Carson argues that working against the tendency to exert total control over one's life can provide some protection against the shock of the disease. If the time comes, one should be prepared to let go, or, as the poet points out: "If you have to fall . . . Do your best to fall . . . In no time at all" (Uncle 37). There is, according to Carson, more continuity than one tends to assume between life before and after dementia, especially in what concerns one's control over language and identity, so it might be possible to find traces of post-traumatic subjectivity in our familiar, supposedly normal, lives, perhaps by paying attention to those aspects of the everyday that undermine our control.
Envejecimiento y producciones cinematográficas ibéricas (Raquel Medina, Cristina Moreiras, Pilar Rodríguez, Barbara Zecchi, eds.), 2021
Events by João Paulo Guimarães
In her 2017 book Forgotten, Marlene Goldman notes that the media often adopts a Gothic register a... more In her 2017 book Forgotten, Marlene Goldman notes that the media often adopts a Gothic register and use apocalyptic language to describe the rise in dementia cases across the west in recent decades. The disease is figured as a “silent killer” that threatens to erase our identities, turning us and our loved ones into a faceless zombie mob. But horror is a genre that is often deployed to depict old people more generally, not just those debilitated by disease. One has only to think of the witches that populate cultural texts of all sorts, from Hamlet and “Snow White” to Game of Thrones. In such instances, horror is used to evoke not just a fear of death but a fear of aging, old age being equated with bodily, mental, and social decline.
On the other hand, the idea of the unnatural extension of the lifespan has also generated its own brand of horror. Immortality may be something humans, at least since the time of Gilgamesh, have always sought to attain, but its pursuit has invariably entailed some sort of retribution. For vampires, eternal life is a curse that forces them feed on the blood of the young to maintain their decrepit existence (a trope that is eerily evocative of the unfortunate stereotype of the present-day pensioner). Movies like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (which highlights the risks and implications of plastic surgery) also express the reservations many have about the powers of technology to unnaturally prolong youth.
In this symposium we will investigate what exactly we are afraid of when we posit old age as a source of horror. We will attempt to identify and examine the different kinds of fear associated with aging and assess if and how these fears can be allayed. We thus invite scholars across the humanities to submit their reflections on films and/or literary works that regard aging and old age through the lens of horror. Our ultimate aim is to harness the thrills and pleasures of horror to think about how quality of life can be improved in old age and how older people can be better integrated in our ever fearful and suspicious societies.
Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities, 2023
In her last novella, The Hour of the Star, Lispector makes plain that the brilliance of life-any ... more In her last novella, The Hour of the Star, Lispector makes plain that the brilliance of life-any life whatever-lies in its capacity to endlessly contemplate itself and that as such it is inseparable from its mode of contemplation. As we will suggest in this article, Lispector's view of life as living contemplation resonates with Giorgio Agamben's conception of being as potentiality. In the last installment of his Homo Sacer series, The Use of Bodies, Agamben tries to offer an alternative paradigm of life to that of Western biopolitics, whose power operates on its separation of bare life from forms of life. Central to this new ontology is Agamben's notion of a life as inseparable from its mode or form, as he highlights using a hyphen: form-of-life. By form-of-life, Agamben means that one's living is never reducible to the biological or economic facts of existence because it essentially concerns itself with its potentialities, its singular modes of being. Life that contemplates itself is a life which simply is without being reducible to its function. In The Hour of the Star, Lispector's heroine, Macabéa is not simply a figure of bare life as some critics have suggested by reducing her life to her factual circumstances. She is rather a figure whose life is affected by its own sensation of existing-its unborn possibilities.
Poetics Today, 2023
This essay explores Ron Silliman's Universe, a serial poetic project which, according to the publ... more This essay explores Ron Silliman's Universe, a serial poetic project which, according to the publisher's description, "were [the author] to live long enough, would take him three centuries to complete". The article specifically focuses on the significance of the book's length for a general discussion of aging, poetry and temporality. One should bear in mind that Universe is not a retrospective work of synthesis but rather a present and future-oriented project. The point of departure for the article's analysis will be the following passage from Northern Soul, the second book in the series: "Page 43 / you will read / differently if / there are 94 to the book / than if there are just / 45, What about / 523 what then / little hen".
English Studies , 2023
This article discusses American poet Steven Zultanski’s 2014 Bribery, a book of post-conceptual p... more This article discusses American poet Steven Zultanski’s 2014 Bribery, a book of post-conceptual poetry which unfolds as a quest for authenticity, the aim being to address the sense of impasse and guilt that, according to the book’s speaker, are prevalent among the people of America, depicted throughout the book as the nexus of global evil. For Bribery’s speaker, we argue, authenticity is necessary to begin again and to circumvent neoliberalism’s individualising tendencies, which make his efforts to change the status quo feel futile. Similarly to earlier American writers like Franklin or Thoreau, self-development, for Bribery’s speaker, becomes a route towards precision and humility, a way to reimagine his community without elevating himself and resorting to easy moralism. Bribery is also an experimental project that works methodically to generate something precise and surprising without relying on randomness and abstraction.
CounterText (Edinburgh University Press) , 2022
Despite the fact that Bruce Andrews’s interests cut across different aesthetic media, concepts fr... more Despite the fact that Bruce Andrews’s interests cut across different aesthetic media, concepts from music, dance and film many times determining the formal and conceptual contours of his compositions, scholars most often read them as bona fide works of poetry. In this essay, we will attend to and flesh out the significance of Andrews’s dialogue with the medium of cinema in two chronologically distant works: Film Noir (1978) and Swoon Noir (2007). I will contend that while Andrews uses the noir, in the first book, to attack the sensorially disabling nature of immersive art, in the second one, the famed pulp genre functions as a grand metaphor through which the poet addresses the ineffectiveness of intentionally non-immersive avant-garde works, like his own 1978 piece, to carry out a much-promised perceptual and ethical awakening. The postulation and presentation of infinite ways of experiencing reality may be, Andrews suggests, conceptually gratifying but it nevertheless leads to an aesthetic blind alley. In the same way that defeatist characters in noir films appeal to the ubiquity of evil and the clout of contingency to exculpate themselves from not attempting to change their fates and the fate of the world, it is, according to Andrews, possible that shock-and-awe innovative works inadvertently and paradoxically make audiences nestle in and become comfortable with uncertainty. There is a risk that viewers and readers take for granted that there are innumerable ways of perceiving reality without actually going through the trouble of engaging with the specific and transformative modes of sensing offered by innovative works. Maybe art’s dramatization of the world’s complexity and variety can too easily be reduced to a style, a catch-all method that ends up making one-dimensional the very domains that it attempts to open up for investigation. In this sense, there is, perhaps, in Andrews’s view, an escapist element, very much like that which colours most detective pulp fiction and cinema, in innovative works that purport to be forward-thinking and transformative but end up promoting a feel-good mood of powerless rapture and amazement. In this piece, we fully flesh out Andrews’s critique of the vanguard’s “cinematic” ambitions and assess the alternative “miniature” aesthetics he proposes. Only by drawing out and bringing its innovations into focus, Andrews claims, will the avant-garde be able to rescue the transformative modes of experience it reveals from their dilution in sublime-soaked pulp poetics.
Nordic Journal of English Studies (University of Oslo Press) , 2018
In Beauport, Kate Colby poses the question of whether the fictions that orient our daily lives ar... more In Beauport, Kate Colby poses the question of whether the fictions that orient our daily lives are necessarily less real, natural and true than the more visceral, complex and historically subtle world revealed by experimental poetry. Colby provocatively revisits and re-evaluates the bourgeois spheres of domesticity, tourism and memorabilia, often dismissed in vanguardist circles for suggesting inauthenticity, ignorance and conservatism. Although never directly referencing Williams, Olson or the Language poets by name, numerous passages in Beauport make it clear that Colby wishes to chime in on their conversation about poetry and realism. As a guide to her investigation, poet enlists the aid of Henry Davis Sleeper, an antiquarian who rose to prominence with the life-long construction of “Beauport” in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a castle he used to house and display his immense collection of bric-à-brac. With a luxurious arrangement of decorative floral shapes as its cover image, Colby’s Beauport hazards the idea that the clichéd designs common to consumer culture and antiquarianism can promote intimacies of a deeper and more genuine kind than those traditionally fostered by experimental poets, affinities which the latter, driven by a desire to enlighten and mobilize their audience, have snootily left untapped. With its exploration of the unthinking stasis that consumer products promote and antiquities materialize, the question Colby’s book wishes to ask us is: what if, instead of waking us up, poetry’s goal was to lull us to sleep?
Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos (Universidad de Sevilla) , 2018
According to Henry Corbin, in Islamic philosophy, “divine language" is seen as an inexhaustible c... more According to Henry Corbin, in Islamic philosophy, “divine language" is seen as an inexhaustible creative power that ensures nature’s ever-changing configuration. In this essay, I claim that American poet Kazim Ali’s compositions show us that there is continuity between divine, natural and poetic language and that it is through the verbal acts of his creatures that God’s scripture goes on writing itself. Ali’s work is thus in line with Islam’s “lettristic” tradition, which shows us the religion allows room for the kind of broad-minded views about natural diversity and sexuality that some critics accuse the West of smuggling into Islamic countries.
Western American Literature (University of Nebraska Press), 2016
In this paper, I reassess the typographical and grammatical play in Ed Dorn's Gunslinger, arguing... more In this paper, I reassess the typographical and grammatical play in Ed Dorn's Gunslinger, arguing that the composition’s meandering form articulates an environmental discourse that has not yet received any critical attention. Prominent poetry scholar Marjorie Perloff summarizes most extant critical readings of the book when she notes that “Slinger is perhaps best understood as a poetic Sourcebook on postmodern discourses” (xvii) and that “the real thrust of Slinger [is] its elaborate dismantling and deconstruction of our linguistic and poetic habits” (xv). While I do not disagree with these ideas (and, in fact, build upon them in my own argument), I argue that Dorn’s linguistic experimentation is indissociable from his take on bioethics, a topic he was studying at the time he was writing the book. My claim is that Gunslinger attempts to valorize the production of deviant particulars in nature in the face of its homogenization at the hands of cybernetic capitalism and the translation of all things into the universal language of information. Instead of trying to represent specific natural forms and militantly defend them through its narrative, the book establishes a parallel between the way nature playfully creates anomalous beings and the way language spontaneously suspends its communicative functions to intimate and animate aimless and humorously deviant combinations of letters and words. Gunslinger thereby re-energizes, I claim, an old idea of nature as a free-spirited maker of useless forms. This notion was, according to historians of science Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, eschewed by Enlightenment thinkers, who founded modern science on the premise that nature was a passive medium for the inscription of God’s timeless and universal laws. In making all things comparable, modern science set the stage for cybernetics and information theory, which Dorn attacks in his poem. Gunslinger essays, I will argue, an ecological poetics of noise and interference, its language positioning itself, with its humorous quirks, in the way of universal translatability, calling attention, in the process, to the unassimilable particularity of all material things. In a comedic manner, Gunslinger thus highlights the importance of resisting abstractions and functional directives for the elaboration of an environmental discourse that stays true to the material world’s ebullient messiness.
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies (Penn State UP), 2018
In this essay, I will show that, tactfully aware of the artificiality of the gender norms that in... more In this essay, I will show that, tactfully aware of the artificiality of the gender norms that inform the algorithms of desire and devilish violence of the blues, Captain Beefheart makes purposed use of that genre’s simplistic sexual logic as a means to explore the more demonic territory nature “in-itself”, a conceptual space predicated on the negation of masculinist and anthropocentric discourses of control. Unlike the Lovecraftian heroes that traditionally investigate the in-human, Beefheart does not recoil in terror before its darkness, performing, rather, a masochistically ludic exploration of the human-nature gap, the reconsideration of which remains an ecological imperative.
Anglo Saxonica (University of Lisbon Press), 2015
Full Stop, 2019
It is easy to see why a study like Martrich’s, in spite of its eccentric and tongue-in-cheek topi... more It is easy to see why a study like Martrich’s, in spite of its eccentric and tongue-in-cheek topic of inquiry, could be understood as a welcome meditation on the present moment, marked, as we know, by a tension (never directly mentioned throughout the book) between the counter-factual politics of the right and the left’s crusade for the restoration of reason. Martrich’s decision to focus on a series of anachronistic figures whose culturally insensitive and hypermasculine ethos might be seen as pathetic and grotesque is not accidental. The author makes plain that a strong belief in ideas that are widely seen as ridiculous and retrograde is above all a sign of vulnerability. Perceiving themselves and their world to be under attack, conservatives double down on their beliefs. Their inflamed posture is as much the product of left-wing tactics (the will to speedily obliterate any trace of conservatism) and its relative success than of actual right-wing vigor.
Ballymun Library/Bealtaine Festival (Dublin) , 2019
The talk will open with a discussion of a set of poems from Lyn Hejinian's The Unfollowing, which... more The talk will open with a discussion of a set of poems from Lyn Hejinian's The Unfollowing, which puts a positive spin on the association of old age with childhood. a trope that is often deployed to infantilize and disenfranchize older people. By contrast, Hejinian uses it to highlight life's openness and contigency. Taking a cue from the poet, I will mobilize the notion of "the old child" to explore questions like: do we get less creative as we age? Are we born with certain talents and/or do we keep acquiring and developing them later in life? What obstacles get in the way of the expression of our multiple valences as we get older? We will survey the latest research on the epigenetic development of giftedness across the life span, dwell on the lives of exemplary polymaths and late bloomers and discuss how these matters relate to the topics of labor division, meritocracy and leisure.
Ageing Masculinities, Alzheimer's and Dementia Narratives (Heike Hartung, Rüdiger Kunow and Matthew Sweney, Eds.), 2021
To what extent can one's attitude toward life help mitigate the impact of dementia? In Uncle Fall... more To what extent can one's attitude toward life help mitigate the impact of dementia? In Uncle Falling, Canadian poet Anne Carson argues that working against the tendency to exert total control over one's life can provide some protection against the shock of the disease. If the time comes, one should be prepared to let go, or, as the poet points out: "If you have to fall . . . Do your best to fall . . . In no time at all" (Uncle 37). There is, according to Carson, more continuity than one tends to assume between life before and after dementia, especially in what concerns one's control over language and identity, so it might be possible to find traces of post-traumatic subjectivity in our familiar, supposedly normal, lives, perhaps by paying attention to those aspects of the everyday that undermine our control.
Envejecimiento y producciones cinematográficas ibéricas (Raquel Medina, Cristina Moreiras, Pilar Rodríguez, Barbara Zecchi, eds.), 2021
In her 2017 book Forgotten, Marlene Goldman notes that the media often adopts a Gothic register a... more In her 2017 book Forgotten, Marlene Goldman notes that the media often adopts a Gothic register and use apocalyptic language to describe the rise in dementia cases across the west in recent decades. The disease is figured as a “silent killer” that threatens to erase our identities, turning us and our loved ones into a faceless zombie mob. But horror is a genre that is often deployed to depict old people more generally, not just those debilitated by disease. One has only to think of the witches that populate cultural texts of all sorts, from Hamlet and “Snow White” to Game of Thrones. In such instances, horror is used to evoke not just a fear of death but a fear of aging, old age being equated with bodily, mental, and social decline.
On the other hand, the idea of the unnatural extension of the lifespan has also generated its own brand of horror. Immortality may be something humans, at least since the time of Gilgamesh, have always sought to attain, but its pursuit has invariably entailed some sort of retribution. For vampires, eternal life is a curse that forces them feed on the blood of the young to maintain their decrepit existence (a trope that is eerily evocative of the unfortunate stereotype of the present-day pensioner). Movies like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (which highlights the risks and implications of plastic surgery) also express the reservations many have about the powers of technology to unnaturally prolong youth.
In this symposium we will investigate what exactly we are afraid of when we posit old age as a source of horror. We will attempt to identify and examine the different kinds of fear associated with aging and assess if and how these fears can be allayed. We thus invite scholars across the humanities to submit their reflections on films and/or literary works that regard aging and old age through the lens of horror. Our ultimate aim is to harness the thrills and pleasures of horror to think about how quality of life can be improved in old age and how older people can be better integrated in our ever fearful and suspicious societies.
A little critical/creative project about artistic craftsmanship, why you shouldn't only care abou... more A little critical/creative project about artistic craftsmanship, why you shouldn't only care about "great art" and why it's OK that you feel like you are missing out on things.
The Gothic’s concern for the return of the past is readable as an anxious treatment of intergener... more The Gothic’s concern for the return of the past is readable as an anxious treatment of intergenerational relations, which are shown to contain the potential for coercion and exploitation. Gothic aesthetics brings to the fore the worrisome significations of old age in global societies that increasingly see age as a matter of productive output. The gothic figure of the vampire in particular reworks the archetypes of the ‘burdensome’ and ‘rapacious elder’, but in all cases (including the child-vampire) gains its threat and appeal from inverting age-based expectations. The mode also purposefully represents old age and ageing as abject or gruesome, foregrounding an uncomfortable possibility famously explored in Simone de Beauvoir’s La Vieillesse; attempts to reverse or annul the ageing process receive similar treatment.
The case studies investigate the work of William Blake, Karl Marx, Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Smith, Ernest Favenc and Jayaprakash Radhakrishnan.
The sustained expansion of the life span and the attendant demographic changes in the West have f... more The sustained expansion of the life span and the attendant demographic changes in the West have fuelled the production of cultural texts that explore alternative representations of aging and old age. The contributors to this volume show how artists in science-fiction, fantasy and the avant-garde develop visions of late life transformation, improvisation and adaptation to new circumstances. The studies particularly focus on perspectives on aging that challenge the predominant narratives of decline as well as fantasies of eternal youth, as defined by neoliberal notions of health, able-bodiedness, agency, self-improvement, progress, plasticity and productivity.
Contributors: Mariana Castelli-Rosa; Carmen Concilio; Jiwon Ohm; Ryan Bell; Patrícia Silva; Sofia Matos Silva; Michael Davidson; Maricel Oró-Piqueras and Sarah Falcus.
https://www.transcript-publishing.com/978-3-8376-6283-2/aging-experiments/
In the genre of horror, elderly people are often used as a trope to evoke both a fear of death an... more In the genre of horror, elderly people are often used as a trope to evoke both a fear of death and a fear of aging. Old age is therefore equated with bodily, mental, or social decline. The contributors of this book investigate what exactly we are afraid of when we posit old age as a source of horror. The aim is to harness the thrills and pleasures of horror to think about how quality of life can be improved in old age and how elderly people can be better integrated in our ever fearful and suspicious societies.