Agenda

In this talk, Liz Barry, Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Warwick, will consider the transitional experience of retirement as it is represented in literature and theatre of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Prof. Barry will consider changing perceptions of temporality in later life, reconsidering the familiar conception of retirement as a crisis of the narrative self, and considering the reconfiguration of the retiree's experience of the world, its spaces and its non-places (Auge) in the fiction and theatre of Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller. Lastly, she will look at Jenny Erpenbeck's novel Going Went Gone and consider the politics of displacement in the intersection of forced migration and old age.