Contemporary Post-Yugoslav Narratives on Aging and Care

What stories did literature in Yugoslavia (1945-1991) tell about aging, old age, care in old age, and the lifecourse? Were characters who were described as old usually wise, experienced, worthy, honorable, or rather filthy, helpless, annoying, problematic, burdensome, lonely? What changed, when, in the 1990s, Yugoslavia violently fell apart not only as a state with a flag, national anthem, passport but as an ideal, an identification? Among many things that underwent radical conversion in this dynamic last decade of the 20th century in the Balkans, was the way in which literature told stories about old age one of them? If so, what were the social, political, and cultural backgrounds that caused this change? Why was old age suddenly regarded and narrated in literature differently? Are there recurring themes or motifs across various art forms for example, comparing literature and film? What can literature about old age in 1990s Yugoslavia tell us about the evolving societies that wrote it, about their collective narratives, about their political agendas, about their imagined futures? How has the situation evolved since? For example, how do old people appear in the literary imagination of writers who fled or were expulsed from Yugoslavia in the 1990s and made a career in the (among others, Anglophone) diaspora like Aleksandar Hemon or Vesna Goldsworthy? This project suggests that severe redefinitions of social order and collective narratives in the 1990s also fundamentally shaped the way in which old age, the aging process, and care in old age are regarded, defined, managed, and narrativized. The project combines literary analysis of fiction, and semi- structured narrative interviews with writers over 65 years of age from the Yugosphere, analyzing their interpretation of aging both as creators and consumers of art. Some authors thematize age and aging explicitly, with some, style and topics change with their own biological aging, and for some, their ethnicity, the genre they write in, or their mother tongue (sometimes a minority language in a nation state), all influence the complex ways in which they will describe or enact the chronological passing of time. The project also aims at addressing the overwhelming focus of Aging Studies as a field on the Global North, and to diversify it, in a focused study of a periphery and its literature, the Yugosphere. It further questions and develops the accepted norms of the field (for instance, the interpretations of what constitutes agism and how we define it), by showing the particularities of a region as embodied in its cultural production.