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Stephen Koetzing (Erlangen-Nürnberg):
"The Presence of Death: Old Age, Whiteness and Masculinity
in Contemporary North American Literature and Film"
Abstract
In my paper I will analyze Philip Roth’s Everyman (2006) and Paul Harding’s Tinkers (2009) in order to exemplify how contemporary US-American novels about old men employ metaphors in order to convey tacit knowledge about aging men. The two novels are examples of a recent proliferation of US-American novels that depict in great detail the troubles of aging men as they explicitly showcase the frailness and dysfunctionality of their protagonists. However, no matter how great the detail, there remains a trace of some kind of hidden knowledge about aging in these texts that the words on the page cannot describe in a denotative sense of the term. This tacit knowledge is a specific knowledge about the aging male body and about the socio-cultural roles and scripts assigned to old men. Drawing on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s theoretical work on metaphors, I argue that the metaphors in the novels serve as both a key towards grasping this tacit knowledge as well as re-coding it to a certain degree. With regard to Everyman and Tinkers my focus lies particularly on the allegorical use of time, as both texts present a retrospective account of respective the protagonist’s life that in both cases can be understood as an American Dream narrative which is closely connected to the selling of clocks and/or watches.
Bio
I studied American cultural and literary studies as well as Ibero-Romance studies at the University of Erlangen, where I received my MA in July 2011. As of April 2012, I am a doctoral student in the interdisciplinary graduate school “Presence and Tacit Knowledge” at the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, working on my dissertation entitled “The Presence of Death: Old Age, Whiteness and Masculinity in Contemporary North American Literature and Film.” My research interests include American film, Jewish-American literature, Inter-American studies, and postmodern literature.