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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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R1,207
Discovery Miles 12 070
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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.
Figuring Age engages the virtually invisible subject of older
women in western culture. Like other markers of social difference,
age is given meaning by a culture. Yet unlike gender and race, the
subjects of age and aging have received little sustained attention.
Central to Figuring Age is the crucial question of how women are
aged by culture. How are older women represented in a visual
culture that is dominated by images of youth in television, film,
and life performance? How do psychoanalysis, rejuvenation therapy
and hormone replacement therapy, the fashion system, cosmetic
surgery, and midlife bodybuilding shape our views of aging as well
as of the older body itself? What is the "timing" of aging? To what
extent is aging a culturally-induced trauma?
In this moving and thoughtful book, Kathleen Woodward explores the
politics and poetics of the emotions, focusing on American culture
since the 1960s. She argues that we are constrained in terms of
gender, race, and age by our culture's scripts for "emotional"
behavior and that the accelerating impoverishment of interiority is
a symptom of our increasingly media-saturated culture. She also
shows how we can be empowered by stories that express our
experience, revealing the value of our emotions as a crucial form
of intelligence.
Referring discreetly to her own experience, Woodward examines
the interpenetration of social structures and subjectivity,
considering how psychological emotions are social phenomena, with
feminist anger, racial shame, old-age depression, and sympathy for
non-human cyborgs (including robots) as key cases in point. She
discusses how emerging institutional and discursive structures
engender "new" affects that in turn can help us understand our
changing world if we are attentive to them--the "statistical panic"
produced by the risk society, with its numerical portents of
disease and mortality; the rage prompted by impenetrable and
bloated bureaucracies; the brutal shame experienced by those caught
in the crossfire of the media; and the conservative compassion that
is not an emotion at all, only an empty political slogan.
The orbit of "Statistical Panic" is wide, drawing in feminist
theory, critical phenomenology, and recent theories of the
emotions. But at its heart are stories. As an antidote to the
vacuous dramas of media culture, with its mock emotions and
scattershot sensations, Woodward turns to the autobiographical
narrative. Stories of illness--by Joan Didion, Yvonne Rainer, Paul
Monette, and Alice Wexler, among others--receive special attention,
with the inexhaustible emotion of grief framing the book as a
whole.
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