Overview
Against the background of Socrates' insight that the unexamined life is not worth living, Reading Our Lives: The Poetics of Growing Old investigates the often overlooked inside dimensions of aging. Despite popular portrayals of mid- and later life as entailing inevitable decline, this book looks at aging as, potentially, a process of poiesis: a creative endeavor of fashioning meaning from the ever-accumulating texts - memories and reflections-that constitute our inner worlds. At its center is the conviction that although we are constantly reading our lives to some degree anyway, doing so in a mindful matter is critical to our development in the second half of life. Drawing on research in numerous disciplines affected by the so-called narrative turn - including cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and the psychology of aging - authors Randall and McKim articulate a vision of aging that promises to accommodate such time-honored concepts as wisdom and spirituality: one that understands aging as a matter not merely of getting old but of consciously growing old.
Full Product Details
Author: William L. Randall (Associate Professor, Gerontology, Associate Professor, Gerontology, St. Thomas University, Canada) ,
Elizabeth McKim (Associate Professor, English, Associate Professor, English, St. Thomas University, Canada)
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:
Width: 23.60cm
, Height: 1.80cm
, Length: 15.70cm
Weight: 0.626kg
ISBN: 9780195306873
ISBN 10: 0195306872
Pages: 352
Publication Date: 15 May 2008
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
.,. the book is geared toward those interested in the psychology of aging...[yet] its explorations into the neural basis of memory, especially autobiographical memory, make it a resource for cognitive neuroscientists as well. The prose-like style (as opposed to scientific language) extends the audience to those interested in the aging processes. Recommended. --Choice<br>
Author Information
William L. Randall, EdD, is Associate Professor of Gerontology at St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Author of The Stories We Are and co-author, with Gary Kenyon, of Restorying Our Lives and Ordinary Wisdom, his ideas on narrative and human development have been published in such journals as Theory & Psychology, Narrative Inquiry, and the Journal of Aging Studies. A. Elizabeth McKim, PhD, is Associate Professor of English, also at St. Thomas University. Her areas of interest include poetic and narrative theory, cognitive poetics, and applied literature. Her scholarship on literature and medicine and literature and aging has been published in Literature & Medicine and Narrative Inquiry.
