The Art Of Ageing Textualising The Phases Of Life

El tema del envejecimiento es total... absolutamente todo existe en el tiempo. A pesar de que la matemática rechaza la noción de que el tiempo pasa, la conciencia humana percibe el envejecimiento como consecuencia del paso del tiempo. Mediante textualizaciones en poesía, teatro y prosa, se pone de manifiesto el sentido y la complejidad de la percepción de esta trayectoria temporal. Por esta razón los artículos que contiene este libro son eminentemente eclécticos y revelan los pensamientos de poetas, cantantes, escritores, críticos literarios, psicólogos, sociólogos y antropólogos.

A follow-up to the popular Graduate Study for the 21st Century , this book seeks to expand professional development to include the personal aspects of daily lives in the humanities. How to Build a Life in the Humanities delves into pressing work-life issues such as post-tenure depression, academic life with children, aging, and adjuncting.

¿Se puede llegar a concebir el envejecimiento como un proceso diferencial según el género? Aspectos analizados en diferentes narraciones sobre el envejecimiento femenino demuestran que así es. Miradas al espejo, revisiones de vida y la expresión de la sexualidad son rasgos distintivos del proceso vital femenino. En este libro se revelan los sentimientos, las preocupaciones, las prioridades y las aspiraciones que moldean las distintas fases de las vidas de las mujeres.

Desire in the broadest sense, as a form of generous self-assertion should ideally increase with the passage of time as we gradually acquire deeper insight into ourselves and others. Prescriptive cultural stereotypes, however, put obstacles on our path to progress as individuation. Yet growing older should not entail renunciation of the singularity of personal fulfilment. This volume is a collection of literary testimonies to the power of art to challenge and resist the social constraints on desire in the context of aging. In the essays, men and women claim their right to age in desire and imaginative vigour.

A brave book with a polemical argument on the paradoxes, struggles and advantages of aging. How old am I? Don’t ask, don’t tell. As the baby boomers approach their sixth or seventh decade, they are faced with new challenges and questions of politics and identity. In the footsteps of Simone de Beauvoir, Out of Time looks at many of the issues facing the aged—the war of the generations and baby-boomer bashing, the politics of desire, the diminished situation of the older woman, the space on the left for the presence and resistance of the old, the problems of dealing with loss and mortality, and how to find victory in survival.

It is entirely appropriate that this book should be produced in Dundalk. Located on the Northern rim of the Irish Pale, this town has straddled a border for centuries. Over the past thirty years, it has come to be closely identified with violent Republicanism both by the Unionist community in Northern Ireland and by Constitutional Nationalists in the South. Against such a hostile background academics attached to the Institute of Technology there have bravely confronted and interrogated these processes which have so blighted the history not only of Dundalk but of places and spaces throughout the world similarly located. In a wide-ranging series of articles, perhaps the strongest message to emerge is that of border as limitation. The notion of border as a liminal space where worlds converge, new realities emerge and transcendence is possible rarely surfaces. Instead, the border as a physical manifestation of divisiveness is repeatedly explored. In a passionate statement of solidarity with the Palestinians, Lavalette describes the construction of the apartheid wall: “The wall is eight feet high and has a watchtower every three hundred metres. Although there are no maps, it is thought it could end up being close to one thousand kilometres in length by the time it is completed” (p. 18). Yndigegn shows how spatial borders gradually become mental borders such that, as visual borders disappear, new invisible borders appear (p. 33). The article explores the dualism of borders—simultaneously protecting those inside from external threats while also preventing those inside from reaching or engaging with the outside world. Ni Eigeartaigh takes up the duality theme in the exploration of individualism as a process either of liberation or one of alienation. Taking the title from an aphorism of Kafka’s “My Prison Cell, My Fortress”, she explores a view of contemporary society as repressive, and of its inhabitants as complicit in the repression. Drawing on a wide span of literature and disciplines, she teases through the paradox of contemporary society that the freedom gained from the liberation of the individual from communal obligations and repression has resulted in a loss of identity and an overwhelming sense of isolation and powerlessness. She concludes that in the “absence of a restrictive system of social control, the individual is forced to take responsibility for his own actions….It is to avoid this responsibility that many…choose the security of the prison cell above the hardship of the outside world.” Her paper does not go on to look at the potential role of the State or of fundamentalist movements in playing on the fear and disconnectedness of the citizenry as an equally likely outcome to that of a stronger capability for personal responsibility. One could argue for instance that the Euoropean Fascist movement and the Nationalist movement of the early- to mid-twentieth century were both based precisely on the dislocation at personal and social level resulting from the breakdown of pre-industrial communitarian ties. While there is no attempt in the book to elucidate any particular developmental relationship between the different contributors, two broad themes may be detected—a concern with borders as socio-political and geographical constructs on the one hand and a concern with the formation of identity in the individual’s relationship to the wider society on the other. Some light is cast on the latter issue by de Gregorio-Godeo who posits discourse as a core concept in identity formation. This leads to the conclusion that individual identity, in this case individualism, is in fact socially constructed in a “dialectical interplay between the discursive and the social identities included—so that they are mutually shaped by each other” (p.93). Using critical discourse analysis, he goes on to explore changing notions of masculinity as evidenced in the Health sections of men’s magazines.

This book examines Larkin’s evocation of place and space, along with the opportunities for self-discovery offered by the act and thought of travel. From his canonical verse to his lesser-known juvenilia and dream diaries, this title unveils a new Larkin; a man whose religious, political and ontological affiliations are often as wide-ranging and experimental as the very form and symbolic licence used to express them. Whether exploring Larkin’s fondness for deictics (‘pointing’ words, like here/there), his fascination with death, or his interest in the sexual opportunities of an itinerant lifestyle, this monograph provides fresh critical approaches bound to appeal to established Larkin scholars and newcomers alike.

The essays collected in Emblems of Adversity: Essays on the Aesthetics of Politics in W. B. Yeats and Others hinge on the question of political articulation in Yeats’s poetry. Politics and history are paramount to our understanding of the Yeatsian poetic text. They are inextricable from the poet's aesthetic philosophy. Yet politics manifests itself in a complex and complicated form in his work. It articulates itself both consciously and unconsciously. It is at once latent and manifest; appropriated and yet rejected; unambiguously announced in the title but immediately muffled in the corpus. Additionally, political articulation in Yeats’s poetry is multifarious, insofar as the biographical, the national and the historical are not only politicized but most often envisioned—apocalyptically—as emblems of adversity. To put it differently, ageing, Irish politics and modernity are synonymous with a Time transmogrifying “ancestral houses” into “ruins”—a Time “half dead at the top.” Self, Ireland and history are intermeshed in Yeats’s symbolism. They are inseparable from his worldview. His rage against ageing most often culminates in raging about the age—both modernity and Irish current reality. These essays trace Yeats’s aestheticization of politics right from the beginning of his poetic career, from his early pastoral innocence to the later modernist experience. Some of them examine Yeats comparatively with other modernists.