Posted on 01/12/2010 8:00:55 AM PST by bs9021
Age Studies, Part Two
Bethany Stotts, January 12, 2010
As reported earlier, one professor discussing age studies at the 2009 Modern Language Association Convention focused her talk on Ghost Worlds messages about adolescence and other items of a more prurient nature. The other three speakers, however, drew a parallel between ageism and neoliberal economic policies.
Age as Class Conflict
Speaking on a panel entitled Age and Affect: Fear, Denial, Fantasy, Ph.D. candidate Andrea Charise discussed elder abuse as it is depicted in Charles Dickens Little Dorrit and Anthony Trollopes The Fixed Period. In this paper I argue that disgust is a prevalent and particularly dangerous affective response to old age and that we might read elder abuse as an acutely disgusted reaction that distances the aged body as a disturbing reminder [of] mortality, she said. Citing examples from Charles Dickens Little Dorrit, and Anthony Trollopes The Fixed Period, my presentation will closely [redux] some of the elder abuse by drawing attention to literary strategies that themselves connote the forcible distancing characteristic of disgust.
Quoting from University of Texas professor Thomas R. Coles 1983 work The Enlightened View of Aging: Victorian Morality in a New Key, Charise said that
Violence toward the elderly can be linked to what age theorist Thomas Cole has described as the 19th centurys construction of old age as a clinically distinct period of life. In response to Victorian moral values that celebrated independence, health and success, the decaying body in old age
, he says, came to signify [precisely] what bourgeois culture hoped to avoid: dependence, disease, failure, [and] sin....
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
There is nothing wrong with these people that psychotropic medication cant fix.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.