Reading Our Lives
The Poetics of Growing Old
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Initial publish date
- Jun 2008
- Category
- Social Psychology
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9780195306873
- Publish Date
- Jun 2008
- List Price
- $67.00
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Description
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 poeisis: 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.
About the authors
William Lowell Randall is a professor in the Department of Gerontology at St Thomas University.