Our April 2025 LMCC meeting took place on Wednesday, April 23 at 5:30pm in Greenlaw 509 (temporarily relocated from UNC’s HHIVE Lab, Greenlaw 524), with options for members to join via Zoom as well.
We discussed The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing: S(h)ifting Dementia by Martina Zimmermann (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Specifically, we focused on the following:
- Chapter 1: “Introduction: Critically Reading Dementia Narratives: Amplifying Advocacy” (pp. 1-22)
- Chapter 2: “Of Wives and Daughters: Stereotypes of the Caring Female?” (pp. 23-47)
If you missed the meeting, you can still access the text on the Readings page of this site!
You can also access the recording of our meeting here.
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This was our final meeting of the semester and also of the 2024-2025 academic year! Look out for announcements and updates about any potential summer meetings and for when we resume regular monthly meetings this fall!
Zimmermann, Martina. The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing: S(h)ifting Dementia. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Edited by Sharon Ruston, Alice Jenkins, and Catherine Belling. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. NCBI Bookshelf, https://www-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/books/NBK464709/. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-44388-1.
Meeting Notes (courtesy of LMCC Co-Director Mindy Buchanan-King):
- Paul: Wish we had more time to get into the later sections, the patient-centered narratives; Zimmermann’s work made me question some of my assumptions about dementia.
- Paul: The question of the archivist; the need to reconstruct and capture the narrative, the need to rebuild; especially bringing in the visual elements of what that looks like. There’s something interesting about the desire to remember as we age.
- Desire: Different functions of the archives; how Zimmermann talks about genre. There is some slippage, especially the categories of dementia and Alzheimer’s, and very different types of literary texts. Moreover, the slippage between author and scholar. Overall, the project is really interesting. Maybe the later sections get to the kind of labor and work involved in caregiving. What is the end goal? It is important to think about narrative function. We’ve talked a lot about the clinical experience; how does the narrative of Alzheimer’s change, and maybe that’s the work Zimmermann is thinking about?
- Paul: It’s tough when we’re sampling, but appreciated the idea in Zimmermann of exploring the mainstream discourse about dementia and how it has changed. The genre and disease slippages are there; she tries to address her definition of dementia/Alzheimer’s.
- Michael: Would also be interested in seeing how the narrative unfolds. Interesting how Zimmermann examines the duality of the archivist and caregiver role, and the assumptions she makes as a researcher.
- Desire: On p. 6, re: advocacy of patients; interesting in terms of the motivation of the project
- Bri: Thought about the duality of the caregiver/archivist, and reading Eula Biss’ “The Pain Scale,” a line about suffering having more to do with the story we tell ourselves about pain, like the pain experienced by caregivers. Who is the sufferer in these experiences? The archivist role is a need to make sense of the caregiver’s suffering, to document the life of the patient.
- Paul: Thinking about media, we all have a digital footprint, but older individuals don’t have such a footprint and need to be archived. Zimmermann also brought up the parent/child relationship, and how the caregiver slowly loses the parent, and the roles they have to occupy. The archivist’s tendency to hold on to that person makes sense.
- Desire: Got the sense early on of Zimmermann having aims of intervening in how we treat these narratives; some of the language, like suffering, caught me off guard. Maybe her goals are stated later on; if she’s thinking about embracing new narratives and strategies of capturing the experience of someone who is not thinking “normatively,” but Zimmermann tends to rely on the language of suffering, leaning into the affective when thinking about the caregiver. It seemed Zimmermann wanted to intervene and embrace something more neutral but does not follow through with that neutrality.
- Paul: Share the same struggle, especially shifting Ch. 1 to Ch. 2. How does she bring advocacy to dementia or Alzheimer’s? She also mentions in the introduction comparisons: how to compare the patient and caregiver narratives; there are touches of atemporality and non-linearity, and celebrating that, but also a focus on capturing pre-illness identity. How does that get out of that paradigm of decline? Maybe if we got into later sections, we would see that.
- Desire: It seems really individualistic; she lists out in the introduction Western narratives, which may be symptomatic of her approach, and how to define the individual. One of the questions I’ve been thinking about is the languages used in Ch. 2.
- Bri: In the introduction, that’s where Zimmermann points out that highly industrialized Western nations were the focus, because there’s a high concentration of dementia there. Practically, her approach was limited by her translation work. Maybe there’s a continuation of a study that engages persons outside of this approach/the Western ideology.
- Desire: There are places where her role as a scientist eclipses her role as a literary analyst; there are interesting things about this, but the literary analysis is lacking.
- Sterling: Not only was she lacking in the literary side, but she also never mentions benchmarks about the prevalence of Alzheimer’s among women. Wouldn’t you want to highlight that, especially in the question of the mother/daughter relationships?
- Desire: She almost shutters out the biomedical side; there is a concern, though, that the caregiver may someday inhabit the role of the patient. There are some gaps and holes in the kinds of information she’s trying to convey. This should have been a collaborative project; this project would have been better as part of a team.
- Paul: The conclusion may help us understand the advocacy; you could pepper that throughout, though. The ellipses in the literature was really bothersome, too. In the literary analysis, it wasn’t clear if she was paraphrasing from the source or making her own interpretations.
- Desire: About the images, there is one point where she’s doing the analyses, it seems cursory; first reading through her analyses, when she’s talking about power dynamics between patients and caregivers. If there’s anything I will take away from this reading group, illness never impacts only one person. It feels like she’s trying to pull away from that model.
- Paul: That brings up the question of whose interpretation is being used; I was thinking of that image, and she makes a quick interpretation. These ideas become pieced together very quickly.
- Desire: The analyses were made in rapid succession; she’s reducing this huge memoir to two sentences; there is an advantage to this to think about this as a jumping-off point, though. There are so many opportunities to think about this topic using other tools and analytical approaches. Maybe using those quick studies opens up possibilities of dialogue.
- Paul: She addresses in the intro how she thought about her archives; maybe a discussion of methods would be helpful. She briefly touched on Susan Sontag and the question of voyeurism; maybe bring that up in relation to the omission of images. More methodology may help alleviate some of our concerns.
- Desire: There are some editorial decisions to consider; Zimmermann has a master’s degree in literature, which leads me to believe that maybe this was a master’s thesis. It does happen in a space of uncharted territory; maybe she had the connections to get it published.
- Paul: Historical context gets very quickly sprinkled in, instead of emphasizing the historical context. A lot of the historical context is provided via brief parenthetical comments rather than emphasized.
- Desire: In a more advanced project, that is something she could account for. She had some opportunities in Ch. 2 to place the familial histories beside the cultural histories; it’s not a rigorous approach. She sets up early on what seems unattainable in a first book: approaching this from a medical perspective, from a literary perspective. She’s taking all of these perspectives on herself.
- Desire: Zimmermann’s work was also funded by a German entity as well.
- Paul: The project itself has productive goals; maybe the text was ambitious, but there was something interesting about the idea of challenging the assumption that loss of narrativity is a loss of identity. Losing language is generally seen as the loss of one’s self. She seeks to challenge the notion of decline. We’re conditioned to think about identity in terms of story-telling.
- Bri: As an idea (Zimmermann’s work), I’m willing to work with this. She’s posing something in a biomedical field that is intriguing. Talking about a UNC/medical school program at Chapel Hill library: A geriatrician discussed how there are natural cognitive declines, and that Alzheimer’s is something else. Did not see that distinction made in Zimmermann’s account.
- Desire: Zimmermann does touch on how the narrative about dementia/Alzheimer’s is framed within the cultural emphasis upon youth.
- Paul: Didn’t really see the challenges Zimmermann lays out in the introduction ever play out in Ch. 2. In the medico-scientific discourse, everything has to have a category or diagnosis.
- Desire: How complicated the question of aging is in these experiences of bodily and cognitive experiences.
- Sterling: Does anyone have opinions on her use of “oxymoron”; why didn’t she go into the reliability of a patient narrating their experience? Is there something different about them narrating in their moments of cognitive decline?
- Desire: I think she’s committed to the fact/fiction divide that exposes her training in the biomedical field; she talks about her time in more isolated areas, whereas in literature we’re taught to be more nuanced. The unreliable narrator would have been a better way to think about this in terms of what she was trying to do as literary analysis.
- Paul: Agree she could have explored the unreliable narrator further. There is a footnote about a scholar trying to emphasize her understanding that pathography doesn’t have to be grounded in fact. But, it was a quick note that could have been explored more in the introduction. The question of the unreliable narrator would have been interesting.
- Carmen: On p. 31, Zimmermann is talking about Konek’s experience of her father having dementia, and how he acts as a teacher. His inability to maintain memories was similar to taking photographs, and his condition inspired Konek to start recording her family history. Her father’s condition pushed her to view her family’s history as a series of photographs, in the way her father’s experience was becoming a series of photographs. That’s a way of viewing a patient not as someone in decline, but someone who can motivate.
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Note: The featured image for this post is the banner image from author Martina Zimmermann’s website (https://martinazimmermann.org/). The banner image is a visual compilation of her various publications.