Suchergebnisse

"'Tender, unsparing, poignant. . . . [A] love story that braids together intimate self-revelation with a rich meditation on the literature of aging.'-- Stephen Greenblatt. On Susan Gubar's seventieth birthday, she receives a beautiful ring from her husband, a gift that startles her into an appreciation of their luck. As she contemplates their sustaining relationship, Susan considers how older lovers differ from their youthful counterparts--and from ageist stereotypes. When her husband encounters age-related disabilities, Susan procrastinates over moving from their burdensome house in the country to a more manageable town apartment by searching out literature on the longevity of desire by authors from Ovid and Shakespeare to Toni Morrison and Marilynne Robinson. During subsequent months of care-giving, her own ongoing cancer treatments, and apartment-hunting, Susan studies the obstacles many older couples overcome and marvels at the passion that buoys her own relationship. A memoir proving that love and desire have no expiration date, Late-Life Love is a resounding retort to negative valuations of old age and a celebration of second chances"--

How can we tap the extraordinary potential of "theory" in graduate feminist training, while at the same time circumventing some of its hazardous consequences? Having earned her degrees before the rise of theory, the author witnessed not only the intellectual excitement it generated in feminist conversations but also its rise to a prominence that qualified its productivity both in the classroom and in doctoral dissertations. By reintegrating literature and literary history in discussions of theoretical insights, students can stretch, undermine, qualify, or extend them. Literary and aesthetic specificities help young scholars move toward original, publishable insights by extending or contradicting, supplementing or supplanting the abstract generalizations posed by the theorists they study.