Last Pages of Their Stories:
Late-Life Narratives of Veterans and
Survivors of World War II
May 30, 2024 at 12:00 PM Pacific Time
Online Event
(Join us on Zoom)
Online lecture by Yu Wang (2023-2024 Strauss Fellow at the Cedars-Sinai Center for Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Center Visiting Scholar)
Organized by Cedars-Sinai Center for Medicine, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies
Cosponsored by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research
Scholars of medicine in the new century have demonstrated the importance of the “dying role” in allowing terminally ill patients to foster meaningful life stories before they die. Regarding how such stories are created, surgeon Atul Gawande argues for the “Peak-End rule,” according to which the patient’s judgement of their life is not based on the average of all moments but on the late ones and the most intensive ones in the middle. The Second World War has been commonly considered a life-changing event for survivors and veterans. My talk examines selected late-life narratives of authors from these two groups. As they entered what I call an “anticipated dying role” due to either aging or cancer, they inspected the meaning of life with fresh eyes through intertextual references to their experiences of war and illness. Balancing the “Peak-End rule” with a life-course approach, I ask what narrative tropes they subscribed to and/or advanced in articulating their lives between these two events, what their stories tell us about the potentials of war and illness as metaphors for one another, and what constitutes meaning in aging and dying.
Register Here
Dr. Yu Wang is the 2023-2024 Strauss Fellow at the Cedars-Sinai Center for Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a Center Visiting Scholar. Soon to be a lecturer in Holocaust and Genocides at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilization at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, she earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto in 2022 and was a postdoc at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Toronto, from 2022 to 2023. She works on Holocaust literature and memory, narratives of illness and medicine, and auto/biography. Her first book project, adapted from her dissertation, is about the discourse of rescue in Holocaust Studies and its early Jewish researchers who also identified themselves as rescuees. Her current project, tentatively titled “Last Pages of Their Stories,” inspects the narrative connections between aging/critical illness and war memories in autobiographies of veterans and survivors of the Second World War.
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