Re-Imagining Ageing: Spaces of Nursing Homes in Alice Munro's Short Story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” and its Film Adaptation Away from Her by Sarah Polley

Gorica Stevanović; Damir  Arsenijević

doi:10.25038/am.v0i17.274

Authors

Gorica Stevanović
Damir Arsenijević

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i17.274

Keywords:

ageing, nursing home, film, literature, Alzheimer’s disease

Abstract

This paper analyses the short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” by Alice Munro and its film adaptation Away from Her by Sarah Polley. The starting point of our analysis is the complexity of spaces of the nursing home and their representation, both in the literary text and the film, with the focus on the representation of people with Alzheimer’s disease. Through such a juxtaposition, the aim is to show that the space of the nursing home, apart from being used as a lens through which we can examine the position assigned to old and ill people, holds the potential to think about nursing homes not as static places, where no new developments occur, but rather as places which allow for a more complex and diverse consideration of ageing.

Article received: April 30, 2018; Article accepted: May 10, 2018; Published online: October 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper

How to cite this article: Stevanović, Gorica, Damir Arsenijević. "Re-Imagining Ageing: Spaces of Nursing Homes in Alice Munro's Short Story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” and its Film Adaptation Away from Her by Sarah Polley." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 17 (2018): 113−125. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i17.274

Author Biographies

Gorica Stevanović

Gorica Stevanović
International University of Sarajevo
Bosnia and Herzegovina

Gorica Stevanović graduated from the English Language and Literature Department at Tuzla University in 2009. She holds a master's degree in Gender Studies from the Central European University and in Anglo-American Literary Studies from Tuzla University. She is now doing her PhD studies in English Language and Literature at the International University of Sarajevo (IUS). She works as a teacher of English as a foreign language at the IUS English preparatory school.

Damir Arsenijević

Damir Arsenijević
University of Tuzla
Bosnia and Herzegovina

Damir Arsenijević is an Associate Professor in Anglo-American Literatures at the University of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is a psychoanalyst in training and the founder of the Psychoanalytic Seminar Tuzla. He edited Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Fight for the Commons (2015) and is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Love after Genocide.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i17.274 DOI: https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i17.274