| The term longevity refers to lives that last significantly longer than expected. Sometimes it is equated with the increase of the human life expectancy. As such, longevity has been the focus of political criticism and policy making in the graying West, and the object of study in many academic disciplines, ranging from biotechnology and health sciences to cultural history and the philosophy of ideas. Literature and art theorists as well as specialists in media and film studies, however, have been relatively silent on the topic. When representations of old age are studied, attention is mostly drawn to the stage of third age, or the group of healthy, active elderly. Fourth age, or the lives of the oldest elderly who have become fragile, has attracted little research interest. Therefore, this project, for the first time, brings leading literature, art, media, and film scholars from Western Europe and North America together to study cultural narratives of longevity. Their collaboration facilitates the further establishment of the field of aging studies from a humanities perspective, based on a methodology developed from comparative cultural studies, narrative theory, and critical gerontology. This project does not start from the master narrative of decline that the last stage of life is often identified with, but from the fascination that (super)centenarians bring about. As opposed to the fear of growing and being old, living to be a hundred years old or older is generally considered to be a landmark to register and celebrate. Specific themes of research have been defined along three lines, which are imagining, remembering and mediating longevity. First, the project studies how narratives about exceptional and improbable human longevity (the so-called genre of longevity stories) are told and retold at different times and in different media. Second, the project contributes to the understanding of how the encounter with (super)centenarians as living witnesses of the past century inspires contemporary artists to creative practices of commemoration. Third, the project aims to critically adjust concepts of late style by means of the analysis of the work of (super)centenarian artists. |
