'There is No Doubt that I'm Old': Everyday Narratives of Ageing

Abstract

The 3-year Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing Project (FCMAP), led by a research team in the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW), and conducted as part of the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA) programme, began on 1st May 2009 and finished at the end of August 2012. This paper briefly outlines the research and some of its findings in order to illustrate some of the advantages of its particular narrative approach to ageing and issues that concern social gerontologists among others including policymakers, stakeholders and older subjects themselves. First, it discusses the responses of members of the University of the Third Age (U3A) to reading novels with depictions of older subjects such as David Lodge’s Deaf Sentence and Jim Crace’s Arcadia. Second, it discusses responses to the Mass Observation (MO) directive of 2009, ‘Books and You’, which was commissioned by the FCMAP team and situates these responses within the wider context of replies to other MO directives on ageing. Finally, the paper concludes by discussing the changing nature of third and fourth age subjectivity and the importance of narrative understanding to the experience of ageing.