“Introduction. Literature that Returns to Life and the Mystique of Age” (2016) (original) (raw)
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Scholars and politicians agree that demographic trends resulting in increasing proportions of older people in Europe and North America pose major societal challenges, which will become more pressing over time. There is also shared recognition that addressing these challenges will require significant advances in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. Advocates for such interventions can be found not only among individual academics and local research groups, but also on the level of structural international collaboration, such as the expert team that recently brought together 23 partners from across Europe to participate in the FUTURAGE Road Map for European Aging Research, which was ordered by the European Commission in the 7 th Framework Program to set priorities for future aging and health research.
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This paper is concerned with the relationship between selves as subject positions and the experience of aging. The existing psychological literature on “subjective” and “objective” age, it argues, has failed fully to engage with the idea of subjectivity, focusing instead upon what are ascribed and attributed identities. In contrast to treating age and ageing as some object-like characteristic potentially applicable to both things and persons, this inquiry explores the internal experience of ageing and whether such experience can realise an authentic subject position. In begins with an outline of De Beauvoir’s views of the “unrealisability” of such a subject position and proceeds to consider whether her views are the necessary consequence of the phenomenological existentialism of Sartre and Heidegger that frames her thesis. Such foreclosure on De Beauvoir’s part, I conclude, is not inevitable, and, ultimately, there is a choice between what may be termed a Sartrean or a De Beauvo...
Memory, Identity and Old Age: The Sense of an Ending as the Story of Ageing
Cankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2020
The Sense of an Ending (2011) by Julian Barnes touches upon many issues such as gender, class, sexuality, death, and memory. It particularly underlines how our memories can be misleading and thus create false images of ourselves as well as of the people around us. One of the subjects dealt with in the novel is the process of ageing. Barnes does not represent the period of senescence as the phase of decay and stagnancy. Rather, it is a new stage in one's life when a new sense of the self is formed and new facets of life-either positive or negative-are (re)discovered. Beginning particularly with the 1970s, old people with complex and interesting personalities have become the focus of contemporary fiction. The increase in the number of elderly people, the developments in gerontology and the theories of ageing have contributed to the emergence of new literary genres such as midlife bildung, reifungsroman and vollendungsroman. The aim of this paper is to focus on the complexities of later life represented in The Sense of an Ending and analyse the novel considering the features of vollendungsroman, a term suggested by Constance Rooke to define "the novel of completion" or "winding up".
The representation of old age is, and has always been, a much contrasted one. Philosophers, writers, painters, film directors, journalists as well as politicians have been portraying old age in an ambiguous way; and this ambiguity seems to have withstood the test of time. Therefore, this paper will delve into the exploration of how aging and the elderly have been portrayed in French literature. Studying old age as a literary theme is another way to understand how the image of the elderly evolved through time in France, and more generally, a powerful tool to understand aging and old age. The paper will assess the ways old age has been and is being represented in French literature; yesterday and nowadays. It will be divided into chronological order; the first part will explore the ways French writers and poets described old age from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Because the 19th century marks an interesting turning point in the consideration of old age, a second part of the paper will be devoted to it. The last part will finally focus on the 20th and 21st centuries’ literary representations of the Elderly.
Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism
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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. vii Contents List of Illustrations viii Introduction xi