Dementia and Culture

This essay discusses the use of analogies drawn from the Holocaust in cultural representations and critical scholarship on dementia. The paper starts with a discussion of references to the death camp in cultural narratives about dementia, specifically Annie Ernaux’s account of her mother’s dementia in I Remain in Darkness. It goes on to develop a… Read more »

Within the still-dominant medical discourse on dementia, disorders of language feature prominently among diagnostic criteria. In this view, changes in ability to produce or understand coherent speech are considered to be an inevitable result of neuropathology. The carnival is not over: Cultural resistance in dementia care, Andrea Capstick and John Chatwin, Pragmatics and Society, Volume… Read more »

Fiction film is one of the most influential vehicles for the popularization of dementia. It is likely to have a particular influence on the way dementia is constructed by society at large, not least due to its consumption in the guise of entertainment. Challenging representations of dementia in contemporary Western fiction film: From epistemic injustice… Read more »

The concept of the stiff upper lip stands as a cultural metaphor for the repression and figurative ‘biting back’ of traumatic experience, particularly in military contexts. For men born in the first half of the twentieth century, maintaining a stiff upper lip involved the ability to exert high levels of cognitive control over the subjective,… Read more »