Examining Personal and Cultural Narratives of Aging: Literary Gerontology Revisited

Abstract

The shared interest in the cultural meanings of age and in life as story has facilitated fruitful exchanges between humanities and social sciences scholarship on aging. This chapter shows how I as a scholar in literary studies with expertise in resistant readings of representations of aging started to experiment with interviewing and ethnography under the influence of cultural gerontology. Inspired by the Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing Project (Brunel University, UK), I established a reading and writing club with people over 60-plus in Maastricht in 2017. The collected data consisted of questionnaires, reading diaries, focus group interviews, and creative writing exercises. Through discussing novels about aging, I got detailed insights into the participants’ attitudes toward and experiences of aging. I soon discovered that my interdisciplinary approach also deepened my understanding of the cultural work that novels about aging do. As such, the project unexpectedly contributed to the field of literary reception studies as well.