Key Passages Talk: Antidotes to Ageism in the Anthropocene: Generational Time and Multispecies Literary Ethnography

Models of the passage from midlife to old age—from Freud, Proust, and Simone de Beauvoir to contemporary conversations about how old is too old to be an American president, disclose the ageism, including internalized ageism, rampant in our culture, with aging figured overwhelmingly as decline. Today, old age is imagined in terms of splitting: the good third age of incremental diminishment and the bad fourth age of unremitting medical catastrophe. What antidotes can alleviate the toxin that is ageism in the Anthropocene, with older populations decidedly at risk? Stretching our capacity to comprehend and embrace generational time beyond three (human) generations is one way. Another is seeking kinship with other species that model longer life. Memoirs of ordinary realism, another.

Kathleen Woodward is Lockwood Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at the University of Washington, where she directs the Simpson Center for the Humanities. She is the author of Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of Emotions (2009) and Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (1991) and the editor of Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (1999). Her essays in the cross-disciplinary domains of the emotions, women and aging, and technology and culture have been published in American Literary History, Discourse, differences, and Indiana Law Journal, among others.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Key Passages series and Idee Levitan Endowment