日本英文学会関東支部メールマガジン　
臨時号　2024年3月25日

______________________
文学研究とエイジ（ング）・スタディーズのつながりを深めることを目的に、下記のイベントを開催いたします。皆さまのご参加をお待ちしております。（参加無料ですが、準備の都合上、事前登録をお願いいたします。）

“Ageing and Literature” Symposium

2024年4月13日（土）10:00-16:45
慶應義塾大学日吉キャンパス来往舎1階シンポジウムスペース
会議言語：英語 (通訳なし)
開催形式：対面

Elizabeth Barry (University of Warwick, UK), “Beckett, Performance and Parkinson's Disease: The Case of Endgame”
Akiko Kawasaki (Komazawa University), “Aging and Euthanasia in the Victorian Utopian/Dystopian Novel”
Noriko Matsunaga (Waseda University), “Neoliberal Time and Postfeminist Age(ing): Reading Rose Macaulay's Keeping Up Appearances”
Kimiyo Ogawa (Sophia University), “Confronting Aging and Death－Doris Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbour”
Katsura Sako (Keio University), “Gardens, Age and Generation in Children’s Picturebooks”
Sarah Falcus (University of Graz, Austria), “Futurity and Ageing in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun”
※各発表の要旨は本案内の末尾にあります。

どなたでもご参加いただけます。
参加者への事前連絡が必要になる場合がありますので、事前にGoogle Formでの参加登録をお願いします。
https://forms.gle/JiKfTJE2Q6xkBELL7

問合わせ先：迫 桂 (k.sako[at]keio.jp) ([at]を@にしてください)
科研費 “Ageing, Time and the Future in Contemporary Fiction” (23K00382)
後援：慶應義塾大学教養研究センター

Early Career Researchers Symposium,
“Ageing and Care in the Works of Woolf and Lessing”

2024年4月14日（日）10:00-11:30
東京大学駒場キャンパス
会議言語：英語 (通訳なし)
開催形式：対面

Yasutaka Kabuto (Tsuru University), “Vacillating in the Middle of a Party Space: Middle Age in Mrs Dalloway’s Party Stories”
Mami Toyota (Independent Researcher), “Conflicting Representations of Gendered Care: Reading Virginia Woolf's The Years”
Kanae Sekino (Adjunct Lecturer, Meiji Pharmaceutical University), “Companionship in Old Age: Attentiveness and Responsibility in Doris Lessing’s ‘An Old Woman and Her Cat’”
Commentators: Elizabeth Barry (University of Warwick, UK) & Sarah Falcus (University of Graz, Austria)

どなたでもご参加いただけますが、事前にGoogle Formでの参加登録をお願いします。会場の詳細については確定次第、追ってメールを差し上げます。https://forms.gle/9dPewHJPm9DYiScDA

Public Lecture, Professor Elizabeth Barry (University of Warwick, UK),
“‘Narrower and Narrower Would Her Bed Be’: Ageing and Embodied Time in the Work of Virginia Woolf”

This paper will consider the representation of ageing and time in the writing of Virginia Woolf, focusing on key scenes－a unit of time and narrative so richly conceived by Woolf－in her novels Mrs Dalloway, The Waves and The Years. It will draw out the complex and ambivalent attitude to getting older in Woolf’s writing, among her modernist contemporaries and in her historical moment. It will touch on the intersection of age and gender always already at play in her writing and her (as all of our) social experience. It will also think about the (sometimes) shapeless or sclerotic body in age as metaphor for various aspects of psychological and cognitive experience. Woolf often begins with the starting point of the skin as an expressive metonym of ageing－and as such a touchstone for desire, disgust, and value. She also depicts sleep in older age in terms of its potential link to death (symbolic and actual) and to abjection－but also to a form of renewal. Drawing on psychoanalytic, medical and philosophical frames of reference－as well as literary close reading－this paper will contribute to investigations of ageing in the contexts of both modernism and the health humanities.

2024年4月14日（日）11:45-13:00
東京大学駒場キャンパス
会議言語：英語 (通訳なし)
開催形式：対面 & オンライン

どなたでもご参加いただけますが、事前にGoogle Formでの参加登録をお願いします。会場の詳細とZOOMリンクについては確定次第、追ってメールを差し上げます。https://forms.gle/T5cntrq46paqd7vJA

問合わせ先：秦 邦生 (kshin[at]g.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp) & 迫 桂 (k.sako[at]keio.jp)
　　　　　　　　([at]を@にしてください)
科研費 “Ageing, Time and the Future in Contemporary Fiction” (23K00382)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ageing and Literature Symposium
Abstracts
Elizabeth Barry, “Beckett, Performance and Parkinson's Disease: The Case of Endgame”
This talk will address the politics and aesthetics of ageing and disability in the work of playwright Samuel Beckett. It focuses on Beckett’s 1957 play Endgame, taking as test case a recent production of the play by two well-known American character actors (Dan Moran (Happiness; Mighty Aphrodite) and John Christopher Jones (The Village; Awakenings) who have Parkinson’s disease. The paper will argue that this production, and Beckett’s theatre in general, can shed new light on age-related conditions such as Parkinson's disease, and the non-normative experiences of embodiment, cognition and mobility that they entail. It will explore the ways in which Beckett’s play spoke to these actors about both the embodied experience of Parkinson's and its existential dimension, giving them a way to think－and feel－about finitude and mortality. Finally, the talk will consider performative dimensions of both ageing and disability, namely the experience of ‘passing’ as both more and less able-bodied that age-related and other disability entails, and the potential of creative performance to transform the ableist ‘stare’ (Garland Thomson), via this landmark production.

Akiko Kawasaki, “Aging and Euthanasia in the Victorian Utopian/Dystopian Novel”
Most of the famous death scenes in Victorian fiction dramatize the fate of young characters; this may reflect demographic realities of the time when the majority of people died before reaching their old age. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the most probable time of death gradually moved from infancy to old age. Instead of creating individualized deaths for old characters, however, some novelists continued to depict the deaths of young characters and others imagined, in their futuristic, speculative fiction, the elimination of old age through euthanasia or scientifically realized immortality. The 1870s saw the start of discussion on euthanasia and the promotion of cremation; the two topics were uniquely associated. This paper will first examine active euthanasia in Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period (1881-82) in which nationals of a newly founded state are to be euthanized and cremated at the age of 67 by law. It will then turn to a form of passive euthanasia in Walter Besant’s The Inner House (1888) in which a group of people escapes from a dystopian socialist state where people never age or die by means of a special substance to establish their own utopia where they naturally age and eventually die.

Noriko Matsunaga, “Neoliberal Time and Postfeminist Age(ing): Reading Rose Macaulay's Keeping Up Appearances”
The issue of ageing is frequently portrayed in chick lit, exemplified by Bridget Jones's Diary, where the main characters are typically single individuals in their thirties. The main characters frequently experience anxiety around their physical appearance and the concept of "successful ageing." Shir Shimoni conducts research on the phenomenon of ageing and examines the presence of lifestyle articles in popular Anglo-American print media over the past three decades. The study emphasizes the influence of neoliberal rationality as a dominant form of governance in intensifying political and cultural tendencies towards privatization, individualization, and responsibility. Shimoni also highlights the distinctive temporal nature of these trends, “here and now”. Following these arguments, in this presentation, firstly, I will begin by providing a historical analysis of neoliberalist temporality, along with its cultural inclinations towards privatization, individualization, and responsibilization, arguing issues around neoliberal temporality. Then I will examine Rose Macaulay’s Keeping Up Appearances (1928), elaborating on the concept of ageing over time in order to elucidate the significance of engaging with early 20th-century literature as a means to disrupt neoliberal trends.

Kimiyo Ogawa, “Confronting Aging and Death－Doris Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbour”
We study narratives because stories could form a bridge between individuals with different cultural attitudes. This applies to those who are young/healthy and those who are sick/old. Doris Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbour is an introspective, fictionalized account of Janna’s (Jane Somers’s) decision to give care for an aging woman, Maudie Fowler, a 92 year-old-neighbour. Janna is a successful, middle-aged associate editor of a fashion magazine. Her decision to undertake caregiving does not stem from a rational thought process, but arises almost spontaneously from her connection to this old lady. Interestingly, it is not just Maudie who benefits from the interaction: Janna who evokes the idea of modernity, driven by self-promoting interest, actually gains what Virginia Woolf calls a perspective of a “recumbent” person. In her essay, "On Being Ill," Woolf demonstrates that a sick person is imbued with creative power and insight while so-called the “army of the upright,” a caustic remark on modernity, falls short of such creativity. Reading this novel allows one to see how cultural processes of a person through giving care to an aging “recumbent” is imparted with such imagination.

Katsura Sako, “Gardens, Age and Generation in Children’s Picturebooks”
Children’s literature is inherently a dialogue between child and adult, or more broadly, those at different stages of the life course. Bringing age studies and studies of children’s literature together, this presentation considers how children’s literature depicts and explores age stages and intergenerationality, focusing on the role of garden in this. In children’s literature, the garden often functions as a meeting place for the child and the older adult, a space that is associated with, and activates assumptions about, both childhood and older age. To explore this potential, I examine three contemporary picturebooks in English that depict an intergenerational relationship between a child(ren) and a grandparent, and include a garden central to the narrative: Roxane Marie Galliez and Seng Soun Ratanavanh’s Time for Bed, Miyuki (2017), Allan Ahlberg and Gillian Tyler’s The Snail House (2000) and Lizzy Stewart’s There’s a Tiger in the Garden (2016). As my analysis demonstrates, they represent the garden as a liminal space, where the associations with childhood and older age are mobilised in ways that both reinforce and challenge age norms and stereotypes as well as the dichotomous view of age stages.

Sarah Falcus, “Futurity and Aging in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun”
This paper brings together ageing and posthumanist studies to consider how Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) critiques the anthropocentric privileging of youth and progress in the ways in which we imagine the future. Central to this form of imagination are generational continuity and the symbolism of the child: a new generation as a promise of the future, or rather, a better human future. This novel draws attention to and interrogates the exclusionary way this type of thinking functions. Through its blurring of human and AI child, ultimately, Klara and the Sun suggests the dangers and the limits of a generational imagination that seeks to reproduce the same, progressive narrative of the future through the image of the child not “growing up and growing old” (Woodward 2020: 55; italics in original). My analysis then suggests how fictional speculative modes might both engage with and yet also force us to reflect critically upon that form of future-orientated thinking.