The starting place for this paper was my husband’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and my consequent growing awareness of the limited, negative and medicalised language with which Alzheimer’s disease is often written and spoken about. This discourse of ‘dementia’ both breeds and conceals a fear of what is assumed to be creeping unreason, breakdown and eventual dissolution. It is a language that serves, amongst other things, to distance, to keep at bay, the existential subject. By contrast, poetry has a richly expressive capability for working through, or simply sitting with, the existential conundrums posed by Alzheimer’s disease; it has the capacity to be alongside us in our terror and ambivalence, because of its allusive and lyrical telling of transitions and borderlands, twilight zones and crossings-over, without the need to arrive at answers. This paper focuses on four of Louise Glück’s poems from Winter Recipes from the Collective in order to explore how they express and contain a vast sense of loss—of identity, of certitude, of a sense of meaning and purpose, of memory, of loved ones, of life itself—and in so doing accomplish something extraordinarily powerful and ultimately transcendent.

The present study examines the influence of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) on the development of the main female protagonist’s personality in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine (2013). While Blue Jasmine loosely adapts the structural framework of Williams’s play, the character of Jasmine Francis emerges as a contemporary reconfiguration of Blanche DuBois, offering a complex portrayal that oscillates between assertions of autonomy and moments of fragility and failure. This conflictive depiction challenges a cohesive feminist interpretation, instead presenting a character whose agency is both advanced and undermined within the narrative. Whereas Williams’s work reinforces traditional gender paradigms, Allen’s adaptation interrogates and selectively subverts these conventions, creating a portrayal that is simultaneously progressive and ambivalent. By juxtaposing representations of femininity across two distinct historical and cultural moments, Blue Jasmine reflects the evolution of gender discourse while exposing the enduring complexities and paradoxes of feminist struggles in a patriarchal society. This intertextual analysis accentuates the continued necessity of engaging with gender dynamics to advance the pursuit of genuine equality.