Blue Nights: The Experience of Frailty in Modern Thought and Life-Writing

Recorded October 18, 2022. A seminar by Prof Elizabeth Barry
(Warwick) as part of the Medical and Health Humanities Seminar
Series. This seminar examines the concept and lived experience of
frailty understood in relation to factors such as risk and change.
Informed by the work on frailty of sociologist Susan Pickard and
gerontologist Amande Grenier, and on the phenomenology of illness
by Havi Carel, it will consider the depictions of the condition of
frailty in the life-writing and fiction of prominent literary
figures such as Marcel Proust, Colette, Joan Didion, and Candia
McWilliam. Both Colette and Didion write lyrically but acutely
about the ‘blue time’ of the fourth age of life, and the talk will
think about the changed—and changing—relation to time, space, the
natural world and other people in this fourth age as depicted in
these literary works. In reflecting on these representations, the
talk will attend to the older subject as active, self-reflexive
agent, but also explore what frailty reveals about the constitutive
place of vulnerability and interdependency in human existence.
Elizabeth Barry is Professor of Modern Literature at the University
of Warwick in the Department of English. She works in the fields of
modern literary studies, medical humanities and – predominantly –
literary age studies, and has published on representations of
ageing in the work of Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, Alice Munro
and Margaret Atwood, among others. She edited the Boydell
collection Literature and Ageing with Margery Vibe Skagen in 2020
and is writing a monograph on ageing and the experience of time in
modern literature and thought, to appear with Bloomsbury in 2023.
Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/