Videos from the seminar "Sleep, Senescence, Subjectivity"
Videos from Professor George Rousseau's annual seminar, October 2018, at the University of Bergen.
Main content
Cultural historian George Rousseau (Oxford University) is known as one of the founders of the internationally established field of Literature and Science, and of Literature and Medicine, academic attainments that will feed into the seminars he offers as a visiting professor in Bergen from 2017-2020.
In 2018, Professor Rousseau's interdisciplinary research seminar was dedicated to sleep. Seminar programme.
About the talks:
Professor George Rousseau (Oxford University)
The Natural History and Poetics of Sleep
- Introduction to the natural history and poetics of sleep: methodologies
- Is sleep a metaphor? Comparison of sleep and memes as potential metaphors
- Why sleep is of especially monumental concern to the ageing and demented
- memory in the humanities and sciences: differences and overlaps
- A broad interdisciplinary approach to sleep in the humanities and sciences
Professor George Rousseau (Oxford University)
Nocturia and the Nocturnal World of the Ageing
- The nocturnal world of the elderly compared to the young
- dreams, nightmares, and the symbolism of night
- Nocturia and other nighttime despairs among the elderly well and the elderly sick
- Deep REM sleep and dream states among the elderly
PhD candidate Gunn Inger Sture (University of Bergen)
Sleep and the Proustian conception of time
- Metaphors concerning sleep and time in the opening of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past
- Sleep, time and ageing
Professor Bjørn Bjorvatn (University of Bergen)
Sleep and sleep disorders (video not available)
- How different sleep stages progress during the night
- Sleep regulation - the importance of circadian rhythm and time of wakefulness
- Is sleep important for good health?
- Six different sleep disorders - how are they treated?
Professor George Rousseau (Oxford University)
Contemporary Culture and the Current State of Sleep Science
- Explanations of sleep and its deficits in 24/7 societies and cultures Western and Eastern
- How cultures collude to disturb sleep states in the various stages of life
- Adequate contexts for the broad spectrum of anxiety among the insomniac ageing
- Current conundrums about geriatric insomnia, memory loss, and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)
Dr. Soledad Marambio (University of Bergen)
The Angst of Falling Asleep and the Dread of Waking up
- On the Argentinian writer Aurora Venturini (1922-2015) and her last novel, Los Rieles (2013)
Professor Inger Hilde Nordhus (University of Bergen)
Sleep and Human Ageing in terms of health and regulation
- Sleep and wakefulness in a life-span perspective – facts, myths and metaphors about sleep in late life
- Sleep in the ageing population – an important component for health and wellness
- How sleep fragmentation in dementia deteriorates the sleep-wakefulness rhythm – a process of individual vulnerability
- How novel interventions target the older person suffering from dementia – exposure to light in order to affect health and behaviour
George Rousseau reads from his new forthcoming memoir Light Sleep
- a personal memoir offering an historical and biographical account of a lifetime in search of deep sleep and its meanings
- combines sleep science and regimes of sleep therapy with literary and historical research
- the author reads passages from the memoir
