Videos: Last Chapter Seminar (sessions H-K)

Marlene Goldman, Torching the Dusties _______________________________________ Protestors have appeared outside the gates of Ambrosia Manor. From behind strange baby-faced masks, they issue a chillingly simple demand: it’s time for the residents of this posh retirement home to give up their space on earth. Trapped inside as the situation worsens, Frank and Wilma struggle to respond. Despite Frank’s failing vision the two must hatch a plan to escape before Ambrosia Manor goes up in flames. Based on the short story of the same name by Margaret Atwood, “Torching the Dusties” dramatizes issues arising from ageism, age-related macular degeneration, and Charles Bonnet Syndrome. Starring Eric Peterson and Clare Coulter, the film marks the second collaboration by writing and directing team Marlene Goldman and Philip McKee. “Torching the Dusties” was produced in partnership with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind and York University’s Centre for Research on Vision. The film remains accessible to people with vision loss through the use of audio-description, and specialized screenings are available for clinicians and caregivers. Through immersive camerawork and well-drawn central characters, the project aims to lessen stigma, increase patient engagement, and raise awareness of issues surrounding age-related vision loss and Charles Bonnet Syndrome.

Soledad Marambio, Aurora Venturini and Her “Old Bitches”: Abject Representations of Old Age as Metaphor of a Falling Country _______________________________________ Argentinian writer Aurora Venturini became a literary sensation when, at the age of 85, she won an important prize for emerging writers. From then on, her previous work –she had been writing and publishing in small imprints for decades– was re issued. Her work is populated with monstrous characters and cruelty and rage are common features in her texts. In this work, I analyse representations of old age in one of her novels (Nosotros, Los Caserta) and in one short story (“Las Vélez”). The words that Venturini uses in both texts to talk about old age situate this stage of life in the field of decay, the abject. Thus, with a careful choice of atrocious terms, the author creates a decomposing old age, a process of physical and moral corruption that, I argue, she uses to make a metaphor of an Argentina and a social class –the oligarchy– that devour themselves. I maintain that, in these texts, Venturini’s punishing gaze is especially focused on the female characters –the “old bitches”– confirming what many scholars writing about age, like Beauvoir, Segal, Sontag or Woodward, have said: that women's ageing is punished harder by society. Soledad Marambio is a Chilean poet and translator. Her work has appeared in Granta, Birmingham Poetry Review and Words Without Borders among others. She has a PhD. in Latin American, Latino and Iberian Cultures and is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bergen's Aging Project. Her forthcoming book Sujetos del deseo: una exploración de la traducción amateur will be published in October, 2021, by De Gruyter.

Aagje Swinnen and Hadewych Honné, Living Like an Artist: Late-Life Creativity and Meaning in Life _______________________________________ In times when creativity is commodified (Florida, 2012; Reckwitz, 2017) and gerontologized (Katz & Campbell, 2005; Swinnen, 2018, 2019), artists are often referred to as examples of successful aging (Gallistl, 2018) because they – supposedly – never retire and remain productive, curious, and flexible until the end of their lives. We argue that this definition of success is very limited in its neoliberal emphasis on creativity as a tool for productivity, health, and independency in older age and that these values are not meaningful in themselves. By contrast, qualitative interviews with ten professional artists over 65 who live in place (including walking interviews in their ateliers) indicate that it is rather their ability to express themselves through creative practices across the life course that gives meaning to their lives. Our data show the creativity with which our interviewees continued to turn their environments into spaces where they can express themselves artistically and, in doing so, find meaningfulness. We, therefore, see artists as particularly resilient in managing the contingencies of life and career across the life span instead of exemplifying the successful aging paradigm. We contextualize our findings by means of literature from the humanities and social sciences on topics such as aging and creativity, space and place in later life, the artist’s studio, and the self-fashioning of artists.

Ieva Stončikaitė holds a PhD (2017) in cultural and literary gerontology. She has been a pre-doctoral researcher at U of Fribourg (Switzerland) and TCAS (Trent U, Canada), and is a member of ENAS and Grup Dedal-Lit (U of Lleida). She has presented her research in conferences and journals, such as Journal of Aging Studies and Life Writing. Her research interests include cultural and literary gerontology, leisure tourism, arts-based research, and active and healthy ageing.

Peter Svare Valeur is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Bergen, Norway. He has published many articles on European Romanticism and Modernist poetry. He is a member of the research networks Historicizing the Aging Self, Christianity and Modernity, and Theories of compilation in the 18th century. His Ph.D. was titled Romantic Figures of Old Age. Readings of Chateaubriand, Eichendorff and Wordsworth (University of Oslo, 2013).

Pascale Millot is a PHD Student in Research and Creative writing at University of Montreal, Canada. She teaches Literature in College. Before that, as a cultural and scientific Journalist, she has published in all the main Magazines and Newspapers in Quebec.

Laura Cayrol-Bernardo is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bergen and an associate researcher at the Centre d’Études Historiques of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales - EHESS (Paris). Her PhD thesis focused on ideas, materializations, and lived practices regarding older women in Late Medieval Iberia. She is currently developing a research project on the ageing female body in 15th c. Florence at the intersection of art, art theory, and natural history.

Daniel Chartier is a full professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal and director of the International Laboratory for Research on Images of the North, Winter and the Arctic (https://nord.uqam.ca/). He has published 20 books and many articles on the images of the North, Winter and the Arctic, Québec, Inuit and Nordic cultures, cultural pluralism and reception theory. His main project aims to create links between circumpolar cultures, including Indigenous ones, and to reflect on the conditions of representation of the images of the North.

Christina Visted Jensen, Torje Hommedal Knausgård, Éloïse Lamarre and Marie Mossé, Going North : a Way of learning to die ? Readings of Vintersong - Ei bok om desember (Hanne Bramness) and “Eveline-georginene eller Skammen” (Lise Tremblay) _______________________________________ Poetry collection Vintersong - Ei bok om desember (2014) by Norwegian poet Hanne Bramness and short story “Eveline-georginene eller Skammen” by Quebec writer Lise Tremblay are being translated from Norwegian to French, and inversely by a group of students and professionals, as part of a cooperation between Université du Québec à Montréal and Universitetet i Bergen (Quebec-Norway : the future of book and literature industry : a collaborative project between two Nordic cultures, 2016-2021). Both works aim to represent the North. Though this North apparently takes two very different forms - Norwegian forests and fjords where winter slowly but surely expands its empire over animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms (Bramness) vs. small town life in Québec’s “Côte-Nord” that is realistically, even sociologically depicted (Tremblay) - yet both works deal with the same symbolic representation of North as closely linked to winter time. If this connection between North and winter has been thoroughly analysed by Quebecer geographer Louis-Edmond Hamelin, it’s also embedded in a century-old Western (mainly Southern) imagery that makes of North and winter the space and time for trial, loss and end of life. Following our presentations and readings of the two works we will invite listeners to discuss with us the way(s) those two contemporary Nordic literary works deal with this imagery: do they take up the tradition or change it, and to what extent? Christina Visted Jensenhas very recently completed her master degree in French studies at the University of Bergen. Under the supervision of Margery Vibe Skagen, she did her master thesis on the late French author Violette Leduc and her autobiographical novels, La Bâtarde and L’Asphyxie. She has also spent a year abroad at UQAM, where she completed an internship at the Imaginaire du Nord laboratory under the direction of Daniel Chartier. Torje Hommedal Knausgård is currently in the second year of his bachelor’s degree in French studies at the University of Oslo. He was on exchange at UQAM in 2020 where he completed an internship under the supervision of Daniel Chartier. Éloïse Lamarre is currently doing her master thesis in Literature at the Quebec University in Montreal (UQAM) under the supervision of Pr. Daniel Chartier. Her research focuses on the history and establishment of writing residencies in the North. Marie Mossé is currently completing a joint PhD (Université du Québec à Montréal/Université de Lorraine) in Comparative Literature under the supervision of Prs. Daniel Chartier and Alain Guyot. Her thesis project deals with the European and American travel narratives in Iceland in 19th century.