A Postcritical Approach to Literary Aging Studies

Older Women's Responses to Dimitri Verhulst's Novella Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill

Bibliographic Data

ID7960143
AuthorsAagje Swinnen (Maastricht University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume44
Issue1-2
Pages261-285
Publication date2023-06-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePoetics Today (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/03335372-10342197
OpenAlexW4379796868
LanguageEN
References cited19

Scholars in literary aging studies typically engage in oppositional readings that reveal the often-hidden age ideologies of texts while addressing points of exit from these ideologies. This form of research is ethical and political in that it aims to clarify cultural meanings of aging and how to negotiate and subvert them in a world characterized by structural and everyday ageism. Inspired by Rita Felski's plea not to go too far in our suspicion toward the hidden meanings of a text and to value uses of literature other than the strictly ideological, this article focuses on the figure of the older lay reader and their reading practices. It presents field work involving a 2017 reading and writing club of women over sixty who responded to the novella Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill (2006) by the Flemish author Dimitri Verhulst. Analyzing the reading diaries, group discussion, and creative writing exercises of the participants will show how these readers draw on both form and ideology when making sense of and coming to terms with the life and death of the main character, an eighty-two-year-old widow who descends from the hill to die and to follow her beloved to the grave

Aesthetics · Art · Ideology · Life writing · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Novella · Plea · Politics · Sociology · Aging and Gerontology Research · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics

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