Aging Moderns
Art, Literature, and the Experiment of Later Life
Columbia University Press
Aging Moderns
Art, Literature, and the Experiment of Later Life
Columbia University Press
What happens when the avant-garde grows old? Examining a group of writers and artists who continued the modernist experiment into later life, Scott Herring reveals how their radical artistic principles set out a new path for creative aging.
Aging Moderns provides portraits of writers and artists who sought out or employed unconventional methods and collaborations up until the early twenty-first century. Herring finds Djuna Barnes performing the principles of high modernism not only in poetry but also in pharmacy orders and grocery lists. In mystery novels featuring Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas along with modernist souvenir collections, the gay writer Samuel Steward elaborated a queer theory of aging and challenged gay male ageism. The Harlem Renaissance dancer Mabel Hampton dispelled stereotypes about aging through her queer of color performances at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Herring explores Ivan Albright’s magic realist portraits of elders, Tillie Olsen’s writings on the aging female worker, and the surrealistic works made by Charles Henri Ford and his caregiver Indra Bahadur Tamang at the Dakota apartment building in New York City.
Showcasing previously unpublished experimental art and writing, this deeply interdisciplinary book unites new modernist studies, American studies, disability studies, and critical age studies. Aging Moderns rethinks assumptions about literary creativity, the depiction of old age, and the boundaries of modernism.
Aging Moderns provides portraits of writers and artists who sought out or employed unconventional methods and collaborations up until the early twenty-first century. Herring finds Djuna Barnes performing the principles of high modernism not only in poetry but also in pharmacy orders and grocery lists. In mystery novels featuring Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas along with modernist souvenir collections, the gay writer Samuel Steward elaborated a queer theory of aging and challenged gay male ageism. The Harlem Renaissance dancer Mabel Hampton dispelled stereotypes about aging through her queer of color performances at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Herring explores Ivan Albright’s magic realist portraits of elders, Tillie Olsen’s writings on the aging female worker, and the surrealistic works made by Charles Henri Ford and his caregiver Indra Bahadur Tamang at the Dakota apartment building in New York City.
Showcasing previously unpublished experimental art and writing, this deeply interdisciplinary book unites new modernist studies, American studies, disability studies, and critical age studies. Aging Moderns rethinks assumptions about literary creativity, the depiction of old age, and the boundaries of modernism.
Scott Herring combines new archival research, interviews, and innovative literary analysis in a book that transforms the way we think about aging, modernism, and artistic production. Eloquent, witty, and lucid, Aging Moderns is also a great read. Rachel Adams, author of Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery
With groundbreaking research and fierce dedication, Scott Herring gives us a modernism never seen before: flourishing decades after its supposed high point, featuring authors in late life unfazed by bodily afflictions. Still intensely experimental, this is a new and different avant-garde, all the more stunning for being unexpected. Wai Chee Dimock, author of Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival
With Aging Moderns, Scott Herring recasts the credo of modernist studies and urges us instead to “make it old.” This magnificent book makes a compelling and urgent case for how a focus on old age and aging challenges entrenched understandings of the period and its aesthetics. Grounded in dazzling archival research, Aging Moderns is a profoundly ethical book that redefines collaboration, creativity, and, ultimately, the very conception of modernism. Sari Edelstein, author of Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age
Aging Moderns challenges both the modernist cult of youth and a pervasive ageism in the culture. Arriving at late modernism via the later life of modernists, Herring rewrites literary history while taking his readers on a fascinating journey through archives and community centers. A remarkable demonstration of criticism as care. Heather K. Love, University of Pennsylvania
In addition to being of interest to students and scholars of modernism, Aging Moderns forces reflections on the barriers and opportunities of senior status toward a realization of critical age studies. Choice Reviews
Intriguing. The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide
Aging Moderns offers the field an immensely readable approach to forgotten—and largely unknown—works by major literary and artistic figures of high modernism. American Literary History
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Experimental Aging and American Modernism
1. Djuna Barnes and the Geriatric Avant-Garde
2. The Special Collections of Samuel Steward
3. Ivan Albright’s Anti-Antiaging Treatments
4. Tillie Olsen and the Old-Old Left
5. Queer Senior Living with Charles Henri Ford and Indra Bahadur Tamang
6. The Harlem Renaissance as Told by “Lesbian Elder” Mabel Hampton
Coda: After Jacob Lawrence at Iona Senior Services
Notes
Index
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Experimental Aging and American Modernism
1. Djuna Barnes and the Geriatric Avant-Garde
2. The Special Collections of Samuel Steward
3. Ivan Albright’s Anti-Antiaging Treatments
4. Tillie Olsen and the Old-Old Left
5. Queer Senior Living with Charles Henri Ford and Indra Bahadur Tamang
6. The Harlem Renaissance as Told by “Lesbian Elder” Mabel Hampton
Coda: After Jacob Lawrence at Iona Senior Services
Notes
Index