Jacob Jewusiak

Abstract: The rapid onset of dementia after an illness, the development of gray hair after a traumatic loss, the sudden appearance of a wrinkle in the brow of a spurned lover. The realist novel uses these conventions to accelerate the process of aging into a descriptive moment, writing the passage of years on the body all at once. Aging, Duration, and the English Novel argues that the formal disappearance of aging from the novel parallels the ideological pressure to identify as being young by repressing the process of growing old. The construction of aging as a shameful event that should be hidden - to improve one's chances on the job market or secure a successful marriage - corresponds to the rise of the long novel, which draws upon the temporality of the body to map progress and decline onto the plots of nineteenth-century British modernity.

Abstract: Abstract:This essay argues that William Morris's work displaces an implicit youthful bias in theories of utopia and socialism by making senescence a structuring principle of his ideal society. For Morris, capitalist age ideology stratifies the lifespan into zones of youth and old age, usefulness and excess, and he perceived the rising reformist socialism--like that of H. G. Wells or Edward Bellamy--as reproducing this hierarchy by demanding shorter intervals of work and early retirement. Viewing the superannuation of workers as emblematic of capitalist waste, Morris annexes senescence from the realm of excess and non-productivity, expanding the horizon of revolutionary possibility beyond that of youth and theorizing utopia around networks of dependence and generational reciprocity.

Abstract: Collected in Sketches by Boz (1836), Charles Dickens’s melancholy story “Scotlandyard” chronicles “the advance of civilization” and “improvement” of the eponymous locale after the erection of a new bridge across the Thames in 1832 (88). White tablecloths appear at the neighborhood eating place, the fruit pie maker acquires the genteel moniker “pastrycook,” and the “loud song and the joyous shout” of the coal heavers no longer shakes the roof of the public house (89). Alongside this improvement in manners materialize more visible signs of progress: the boot-maker adds a first floor to his business, a jeweler sets up shop, and the once conservative tailor hires a coterie of uniformed assistants. Yet near the end of this sketch appears the figure of an old man: “Amidst all this change, and restlessness, and innovation, there remains but one old man. . . . Misery and want are depicted in his countenance; his form is bent by age, his head is gray with length of trial, but there he sits from day to day, brooding over the past; and thither he will continue to drag his feeble limbs, until his eyes have closed upon Scotland-yard, and upon the world together” (89–90). Set against the background of Scotland-yard’s bustle, the anonymous old man is Dickens’s way of representing that which has been left behind by the youthful narrative of development that modernizes the world around him. The old man endures alongside this meaningful development, asserting his own stubborn existence as proof that he is not only the excess of modernity but also that which exceeds it. Most critics assume that the developmental plots of modernity are primarily concerned with the maturation of youth. In what Franco Moretti identifies as a central means of understanding the “bewitching and risky process” of modernity, the bildungsroman relates the story of a youth who passes into adulthood amidst great struggle, eventually reintegrating into the society from which he or she has been alienated (5). In the English bildungsroman, “Youth acts as a sort of symbolic concentrate of the uncertainties and tensions of an entire cultural system,” and so it must be overcome in the process of achieving a stable maturity (Moretti 185).1 Reaching a very different conclusion, Patricia Meyer Spacks nevertheless claims that for Victorian novelists like Dickens “the adolescent . . . becomes a version of the self,” a point of “predominant wistful identification” (195). For Spacks the problem is that overcoming the dangers of adolescent aggression and sexual energy merely results in “[t]he necessity, the discipline, the sorrow of maturity” (217). Providing different accounts of the progression from youth to maturity, Moretti and

Abstract: Alarmist demography often situates older people as natural disasters: images of the 'gray flood' and 'silver tsunami' imbue senescence with the destructive force of climatic proportions. This Element focuses on the demographic dread arising from the relative shift in younger and older populations: not of a world lacking children, but of one catastrophized by the overabundance of the old and aging. Drawing on examples of science fictional sterility dystopias, Aging Earth challenges the privilege of youth in ecocritical thought and practice, especially the heteronormative urgency to address climate change for the sake of children and future generations. By decoupling the figurative connection between futurity and children, senescent environmentalism attunes itself to the contingency of non-linear and non-teleological futures: drawing together the delicacy of ecosystems on the brink with the structural precarity of older people, queers, and people of color.

Abstract: Focusing on the impulsive act, this essay analyzes the relationship between the temporality of decision making and the determination of social context in Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), The Woo...

Abstract: In the first two volumes of this work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing, fiction, and theories of literature. This final volume, a comprehensive reexamination and synthesis of the ideas developed in volumes 1 and 2, stands as Ricoeur's most complete and satisfying presentation of his own philosophy.

Abstract: Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Abstract: A pioneering attempt to relate the theory of literary fiction to a more general theory of fiction, using fictions of apocalypse as a model. This pioneering exploration of the relationship of fiction to age-old conceptions of chaos and crisis offers many new insights into some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Examining the works of a wide range of writers from Plato to William Burroughs, Kermode demonstrates how writers have persistently imposed their \"fictions\" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit.