Aging well: Shaping age identities in the literature of the British welfare state

This dissertation traces a literary genealogy of old age and argues that British literature offers both a systematic challenge to the regulatory models of the life course solidified during the twentieth century and emerging from the welfare state, as well as a necessary caveat concerning recent processes that individualize, multiply, but also potentially dismantle social provisions for the elderly in late life. By examining such topics as retirement, intergenerational relations, and narrative ethics, I create a literary-historical archive that resists easy internalization of socio-economic, cultural, and medical-scientific practices and discourses—such as the “alzheimerization” of old age—that seek to manage the “problem” of an aging population, while likewise sharing with the broader field of aging studies the goal of disassociating old age from damaging equations with decline and loss. Beginning with the postwar decades and extending to early twenty-first century texts, this study examines the creation of aging subjects who must negotiate both individual agency and collective social responsibility. I show how the anxious depictions of labor and late life in the mid-century plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter still inform current debates about retirement, pensions, and social welfare provisions. Other chapters, including one discussing the work of B. S. Johnson, explore how the depiction of subjective dimensions of aging (including anxiety about growing older) can simultaneously register the material, historical imprint of exclusionary age-related policies (such as the failings of institutional care). In later chapters on life writing, the “neuronovel,” and colonial and postcolonial literature, I highlight the changing and often contradictory disciplinary constructs, cultural norms, and social policies that idealize some forms of aging “well,” but which then morally burden individuals with the achievement of such ideals or serve to marginalize other already-vulnerable groups, such as women and migrant communities.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2018

Author dc:creator

• Skwarczek, Katherine

Contributors dc:contributor

• Hansen, Jim
• Gaedtke, Andrew
• Mahaffey, Vicki
• Markley, Robert

• literary age studies
• literary aging studies
• age studies
• aging studies
• welfare state
• aging well
• British literature
• Samuel Beckett
• Harold Pinter
• B. S. Johnson
• Muriel Spark
• Ian McEwan

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2018 Katherine Skwarczek

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/101154

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/101154