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

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 paperHow 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