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This wide-ranging study looks at how the ageing process has alternately been figured in and excluded from twentieth-century French literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis. It espouses a critical interdisciplinarity and calls into question the assumptions underlying much research into ageing in the social sciences, work in which the negative aspects of growing older are almost invariably suppressed. It offers a major reappraisal of Simone de Beauvoir's great but neglected late treatise, La Vieillesse , and presents the first substantial discussion of a lost documentary film about old age in which Beauvoir appears and which she helped to write, PROMENADE AU PAYS DE LA VIEILLESSE. Questioning Beauvoir's own rather reductive reading of Gide's work on old age, this study analyses the way in which his Journal and Ainsi soit-il experiment with a range of representational models for the senescent subject. The encounter between psychoanalysis and ageing is framed by a reading of Violette Leduc's autobiographical trilogy, in which she suggests that psychoanalysis, to its detriment, simply cannot allow ageing to signify. This claim is tested in a critical survey of recent theoretical and clinical work by psychoanalysts interested in ageing in France, the UK and the US. Lastly, Hervé Guibert's recently republished photo-novel about his elderly great-aunts, Suzanne et Louise , is examined as a work of intergenerational empathy and is found, in addition, to be an important statement of his photographic aesthetic. Navigating between the extremes of fury ('age rage') and serene acceptance ('going gently'), this study aims throughout to examine the role which ageing plays in formal, as well as thematic, terms in writing the life of the subject.

Thematology --- French literature --- anno 1900-1999 --- Aging in literature --- Veroudering in literatuur --- Vieillissement in littérature --- 20th century --- Aging in literature. --- History and criticism.

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Age moyen dans la littérature --- Aging in literature --- Crise de l'âge adulte dans la littérature --- Ervaring in literatuur --- Evénements stressants de la vie dans la littérature --- Experience in literature --- Expérience dans la littérature --- Herinnering in de literatuur --- Life change events in literature --- Memory in literature --- Middelbare leeftijd in de literatuur --- Middle age in literature --- Midlife crisis in de literatuur --- Midlife crisis in literature --- Mémoire dans la littérature --- Stresserende gebeurtenissen van het leven in de literatuur --- Veroudering in literatuur --- Vieillissement in littérature --- Aging in literature. --- American fiction --- Experience in literature. --- Life change events in literature. --- Memory in literature. --- Middle age in literature. --- Midlife crisis in literature. --- History and criticism. --- History and criticism --- 20th century