Panel: Paternity, Memory, and the Boundaries of Biology, Culture, and
History
Copanelists: Emily Hipchen and Roger Porter
For demographic reasons—increasing longevity among Americans and the graying of the babyboom generation—a new class of life writing has emerged in the US: the narrative of a parent with dementia (usually a father) by an adult child (almost always a care-giving daughter). As children assume responsibility for demented parents—as they assume, that is, quasi-parental roles toward them—they are called upon to witness a process of mental transformation that impedes communication, and in the end, may utterly destroy language. Thus, just when they may desire to confirm, supplement, and investigate their memories of growing up, crucial repositories of those memories may become fallible, and ultimately entirely unavailable to translation from one generation to the next. The complex crisis of identity posed to parents and their children in these fraught circumstances has generated a significant number of memoirs—at least forty, according to an informal survey of on-line booksellers’ databases. This number includes a good many self-published volumes. The number of what I call “visible” memoirs—those published by established presses and reviewed in mainstream media—is much smaller (but growing); the most notable among these are Jonathan Franzen’s “My Father’s Brain,” Elizabeth Cohen’s The House on Beartown Road, and Sue Miller’s The Story of My Father.
My paper will explore a number of issues raised by this new life writing literature: the marked difference between the demographics of the “visible” memoirs and those of the invisible ones; how memoirs are shaped by the care-giving role; the strategies they deploy to translate the increasingly inaccessible subjectivity of the demented parents—resisting without denying the process of mental deterioration; the extent to which they succeed in representing demented, often childlike parents without patronizing them.
Thursday, June 26 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Changing the Subject
Copanelists: Susanna Egan, Leigh Gilmore, Alfred Hornung, and Gillian Whitlock
G. Thomas Couser is Professor of English and Director of Disability Studies at Hofstra University. His books include Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (1997) and Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (2203). His work has been assigned in Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States in courses in American studies, rhetoric, deaf studies, political science, women’s studies, and disability studies.