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Literature and Ageing (Hardcover)
Elizabeth Barry; As told to Margery Vibe Skagen; Contributions by David Amigoni, Elizabeth Barry, Emily Timms, …
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R1,163
Discovery Miles 11 630
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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New approaches to the topics of old age and becoming old depicted
in a range of texts from modern literature. The central focus of
this book is the experience of growing old as represented in
literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day: an
experience shaped by changes in longevity, a new science of
senescence, the availability of state pensions, and other phenomena
of recent history. The collection considers the increasing
prominence of stories of ageing, challenging the idea that old age
is an uneventful time outside of the parameters of literary
narrative. Instead, age increasingly is the story. As the older
population swells, political crises are construed as the old
stealing from the young, and the rights of older people are
sacrificed to the economics of care, it becomes ever more important
to think about and question, as literature does, the symbolic
aspects of ageing - the cultural imaginary that determines the way
that society sees old age. The work in this volume explores age
stories in relation to futurity, precarity and climate change. It
brings to light narratives of resistance to colonial imperialism
and reproductive futurism framed in terms of age; and tests the
lived experience of growing old and the challenge it offers to
individualistic conceptions of selfhood, work and care. The
literary works examined - hailing from England, North America,
Japan and the Caribbean, and including texts by Margaret Drabble,
Samuel Beckett and Matthew Thomas - ask how we feel about ageing -
so often the determinant of how we think about it.
This work investigates the relationship between verbal cliche,
memory and authority in Beckett's prose and theatre, and argues
that by consciously manipulating the language of cliches, Beckett
challenges intellectual, social and religious authority and argues
for the creative value of stupidity, a key concept in the thinking
of philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Deleuze.
This new book situates Beckett in a philosophical and literary
tradition that has argued for the creative value of stupidity, a
key concept in the thinking of philosophers such as Wittgenstein.
It investigates the relationship between verbal cliche, revealing
the strategies he used to challenge intellectual and social
authority in his works.
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