Download Aging and Identity: A Humanities Perspective by Sara M. Deats, Lagretta Lenker PDF

By Sara M. Deats, Lagretta Lenker

ISBN-10: 0275964795

ISBN-13: 9780275964795

Viewing creative works during the lens of either modern gerontological conception and postmodernist strategies, the contributing students research literary remedies, cinematic depictions, and creative photographs of getting older from Shakespeare to Hemingway, from Horton Foote to Disney, from Rembrandt to Alice Neale, whereas additionally evaluating the attitudes towards getting older in local American, African American, and Anglo American literature. The examples show that lengthy earlier than gerontologists counseled a Janus-faced version of getting older, artists have been celebrating the variety of the aged, hard the bio-medical equation of senescence with inevitable senility. Underlying all of this dialogue is the company conviction that cultural texts build in addition to encode the traditional perceptions in their society; that literature, the humanities, and the media not just replicate society's mores yet may also support to create and implement them.

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Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just. 28-36) In this difficult passage, Lear exhorts the rich to cure themselves of their egotism and complacency ("take physic, pomp") by experiencing the suffering of the cold, hungry wretches of the world, concluding that if the "haves" could learn to empathize with the "have nots," they would be moved to share their excess with those who have nothing ("shake the superflex to them"), thereby establishing the justice on earth that the gods have failed to enact ("show the heavens more just").

Cold and shivering amid the towering tempest, the 28 T H E AGING MALE IN LITERATURE King forgets himself and succors his faithful Fool; transcending his own misery, he empathizes with all the cold, hungry, homeless outcasts of society, realizing that when he had reigned in glory and power, he had been callously indifferent to the suffering of his subjects: Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these?

Instead, he seeks to continue to enjoy the privilege of power but without the responsibility of power, divesting himself of the burden of rule while maintaining the entitlement of power and status. This scheme includes the retired king's unworkable plan of alternately descending on Goneril's and Regan's households with his retinue of one hundred knights for prolonged and costly stays. By far the most poignant difference between Prospero and Lear, however, is the fact that the former is in complete control of what is going on around him, while the latter abjectly has lost control of the course of his later life.

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