When Cynthia Port teaches a work of literary modernism like Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, she offers students a warning—the first time you read this work, it won’t make much sense—and a promise: every time you reread it, it has the potential to open up in rewarding and surprising ways. In “‘This Is What I Have Made of It’: Rereading Time and Age in the Classroom,” she explores the increasing challenge of engaging undergraduates in works that speak to the passage of time and the experience of age. Addressing age, time, generation, and attention in the literature classroom, she looks to age studies—and to writers like Woolf herself—for models of age awareness, age economy, and age translation that might serve to engage students and promote intergenerational connection during a time of technological transformation, political instability, and radical change.
The reverberations of rereading in contemporary Irish fiction and the classroom provide the focus for Paige Reynolds’s “Morality, Mortality, and Sexual Mores: Rereading Joyce’s Dubliners.” Joyce’s stories, organized by the categories of youth, adolescence, young adulthood, maturity, and public life, have provided a rich resource for Irish women writers, whose characters can return to these stories to parse present-day experience. Examining recent fiction by Anne Enright, Deirdre Madden, and Sally Rooney in which female protagonists reframe the recent past through a revision of Joyce’s “The Dead,” Reynolds demonstrates how the juxtaposition of past reading with present-day adaptation reveals characters’ social and psychological circumstances in the contemporary moment. For students, these stories underscore the traction of stubborn social problems, including instantiated sexism and ageism, while encouraging them to understand the potential activism elicited from the reading and rereading of difficult modernist texts.
In “The Truth about Rereading: Returning to Ourselves and Others,” Cecilia Feilla recalibrates the ostensible focus of rereading—becoming better readers of texts—to offer a formulation that places self rather than text at the center, one that posits return as an act of both self-affirmation and self-discovery. Recasting Denis Diderot’s formulation that “our true opinions are those to which we return the most often,” Feilla argues for rereading as a way to encounter what we have forgotten--in both the text and ourselves. Her paper compares two recent works on rereading by women at the end of their careers: literature scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks’s On Rereading (2013) written after retiring from teaching, and memoirist and activist Vivian Gornick’s Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader (2020), showing how their projects of rereading also entail reading alongside the readings and opinions of others.
Kathleen Woodward returns to her own extensive body of scholarship on aging to reflect on the autobiographical dimensions of rereading. In “Rereading Age Criticism, Reading Myself: The Difference Age Makes,” she first revisits her own optimistic essays on feminist aging, written from the perspective of youth and middle-age. Now in her seventies, Woodward refracts that early writing through the lens of her own recent thinking on the paradigm of the fourth age, theorized by age critics Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs as a social imaginary of aging without agency and characterized by biological infirmity. Closing with reflections on such texts as Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, which represent aging in terms of frailty and vulnerability, Woodward explores how an awareness of the effects of the fatalistic if often realistic medical dimensions of discourses of the fourth age might—along with the act of writing itself—serve as an antidote to the internalization of such discourses.
Each panelist will speak for no more than 15 minutes to allow ample time for Q & A.