Aging professors: Reading transatlantic academic plays of the 1990s
Aging professors: Reading transatlantic academic plays of the 1990s

Summary/Abstract: A comparative reading of Volodymyr Prat͡s’ovytyǐ ’s Ostanni͡a polemika profesora Dobrenka (The final polemic of professor Dobrenko, 1991) and Donald Margulies’s Collected Stories (1996) contributes to the understanding of the Ukrainian and US-American academic play of the 1990s. The chosen plays address the vulnerability of late adulthood, the close correlation of academia’s decline with the physical and emotional deterioration of older professors, references to the past, the complexities of memory, and power dynamics. If Prat͡s’ovytyǐ ’s drama engages with the essential theme of national identity within Ukrainian academia in the transitional period, Margulies’s text for the stage captures the intricate layers of personal memories and a problem of cultural appropriation. Both plays illuminate generational conflicts between younger and older scholars, emphasizing health struggles, emotional wounds, growing disillusionment, and the heavy responsibility the latter bear. The medical humanities framework is instrumental in reading aging professors’ unsettled relationships and the medicalization of narrative.

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