On the Phenomenon of Aging: Representations of Retirement Home Residents in Literature and the Politicization of Dementia

Urša Marinšek: Retirement Home Stories in Slovenian Literature
When it comes to the notion of cultural aging (and not biological) at least two major cultural narratives of aging exist: the decline narrative and the age-defying narratives. The decline narrative coincides with many of the aging stereotypes (e.g., frailty, vulnerability, disability, immobility, dependency, and dementia). The age-defying narratives include the idea of active aging, striving to slow down aging and preventing a person to decline. As studies into aging by scholars and literary gerontologists have shown, these cultural narratives can be found in many literary works. The aim of this contribution is to outline literary representations of age and aging in contemporary Slovene literature. Many works offer insight into these representations; we will take a look at the novels Home Home (Dom dom, 2008) by Tone Partljič, Chronicle of Forgetting (Kronika pozabljanja, 2014) by Sebastijan Pregelj, a collection of short stories Coffee Circle (Kavni krog, 2021) by Barbara Hanuš, and others. Various books, various genres, offering many perspectives on old age and aging. The books describe older people in various ways, discuss their worth, and present stereotypical/prevalent cultural narratives of older people. 

About the lecturer:
Urša Marinšek studied English Language and Literature and Sociology at the Faculty of Arts, the University of Maribor. She is currently employed at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care, at the University of Graz in Austria. She has been collaborating in many international and interdisciplinary research projects connected to aging, digitalization, and digital learning. In her research, she focuses on representations of old age, ageing, and care in Slovenian, North-American, and British literature.

Dr. Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl:
Politicising Forgetfulness:
Representations of Dementia in Recent South Slavic Fiction 
In South Slavic literatures, considerable attention is currently being paid to suppressed and competing memories of war and political violence. An increasing focus on older protagonists, notably on people with dementia, is conspicuous in this context. As Krüger-Fürhoff et al (2021) have demonstrated, in fiction, dementia is not merely addressed in terms of an ahistorical illness, but used to represent traumatic historical events which prove difficult to remember. Literary representations of the disease are thus highly politicised: Dementia is treated not so much as an individual experience, but as a society’s forgetfulness about its past. Using examples from recent Croatian, Bosnian and Bulgarian fiction (Jergović, Mlakić, Gospodinov), I will analyse, in this paper, in what ways literary narratives of memory loss tie in with and feed into debates about memory politics in the Southeast European context.

About the lecturer:
Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. She specialises in literary and cultural studies with a focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian as well as post-Yugoslav fiction, émigré literature, and age/ageing studies. In her PhD thesis, she analysed representations of women’s ageing in Russian fiction. She is the editor of the volume Aging in Slavic Literatures: Essays in Literary Gerontology (Bielefeld, 2017). Among her recent publications is the multi-disciplinary essay collection Foreign Countries of Old Age: East and Southeast European Perspectives on Aging (Bielefeld, 2021), co-edited with Oana Hergenröther. She also is a member of the project team of the research project “Transforming Anxieties of Ageing in Southeastern Europe: Political, Social, and Cultural Narratives of Demographic Change,” funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (2023–2027).