ifk Lecture: Lena Ekelund: Just in Time. New Narratives of Female Ageing and Old Age

How to be an old woman? The lecture looks to contemporary fictional and autofictional texts for answers. Female old age has been traditionally maligned and associated with invisibility and marginality. Role models which go beyond the meek and harmless grandmother or the hag are sparse. Texts by authors such as Elizabeth Strout, Jane Campbell, Lucia Berlin and Natascha Wodin feature new figurations and narratives, thus opening up ways of thinking about old age not just in opposition to youth, but as a phase of life with its own rites of passage and developmental stages. Old age is acknowledged as a »different country in which we are all nomads« (Campbell), an »Anderswelt« (Wodin), and bodily changes, frailty and loss are explored in a bold, sensual and detailed manner. However, current narratives of female old age offer more than a link between ageing and bodily and mental decline. They defy the exclusive association of novelty with the young, establishing new models of intergenerational and intertextual connection.