老化與城市：以當代英國小說為例 (II-I)

This project, based on my previous research experience in the 2010 and 2011 NSC projects, “Contemporary British Fiction: The City and Affect,” but extending my research interest to the studies of ageing, will model upon the above-mentioned scholars’ routes of research and yet make a detour to target on the urban middle class’ ageing problems by using some contemporary British fictions as the cases of my investigations. By illustrating the experience of older life in the city and the problems the elderly are forced to confront, this project seeks to add a beam of new light to the spectrum of ageing studies in literary representation and shows how ageing “coincides and impacts with urban life, denies or supports access to social and economic resources and influences the ‘voice’ of older people in the city” (Bunchandranon, Howe, and Payumo 141). In my first-year project, which is entitled “The Rift in Age/Identities: Ageing and Its Discontents in The Body.” I will address the split between the mature, sophisticated mind of the elderly and the newly transplanted young, robust body in Hanif Kureishi’s semi-sci-fi, semi-Boccacion Decameron novella, The Body. It attempts to argue that in this twentieth-first-century fable of the pursuit-of-immortality, Kureishi unravels an emerging question on age identities which the contemporary urban middle class are more and more frequently compelled to confront; namely, due to the increase of life expectancy and the advancement of medical technology, the rift between the biological, chronological age and the subjective, psychological age may be either enlarged or “highly variable depending on the meaning given to the body and the self” (Hepworth 2). This project will then try to discuss, assess, and critique how the urban middle class’ anxiety over ageing is dramatized in this cosmopolitan, fantastic fable, hence making a critical appraisal of the novel’s contribution to the field. Methodologically, my first-year project will tentatively adopt Foucauldian thinking and theories to approach Kureishi’s The Body. Following Foucault’s genealogy of the body, this project will see the body as passive and docile. Apart from Foucault, it will also keep track of the recent interdisciplinary ageing studies theories, as is mentioned above, with a to contextualizing my research within the frame of current ageing studies.