Keywords

Introduction

The academic discipline of literary studies matters because it elucidates how literature intervenes in and shapes the social world. The type of cultural work performed by literary texts helps us to imagine a future that is more inclusive of women, LGBTQ+, older people, people of color, people who live with a disability, and nonhuman animals. Some have even argued that literature makes us better citizens. Martha Nussbaum (1990), for instance, believes that great literary fiction can generate moral insight. Such convictions about the role and benefits of literature are part of the credo that informed my own academic formation. In this chapter, however, I will recount how I grew uncomfortable with this and what steps I took to reinvent my scholarly practice. I will detail the methodological innovation with which I experimented, the results, and how this eventually helped me to reevaluate my point of departure as a literary scholar specialized in representations of aging and later life.

Literary Gerontology and Oppositional Reading

As Sarah Falcus has written, “in literary studies, ageing has been the unacknowledged shadow that intersects with more prominent approaches such as gender or postcolonialism” (2015, p. 53). This has been changing since the 1980s, both due to the influence of feminist literary criticism, evident in my own, early work (Swinnen, 2006), and the rise of cultural studies. They paved the way for literary scholarship focused on issues of representation related to aging and later life, a field referred to as literary gerontology. Literary scholars who practice literary gerontology engage in a type of oppositional reading that reveals the often hidden age ideologies of a text while simultaneously addressing points of exit from these ideologies. As such, they examine the power of the text “to demystify, destabilize, denaturalize” as well as “to recontextualize, reconfigure, or recharge perception” (Felski, 2015, p. 17). The work of literary gerontologists is ethical and political. It aims to clarify cultural meanings of aging, negotiating and subverting them in a world characterized by structural and everyday ageism. There is a clear preference within literary gerontology for dialogic highbrow literature that includes different points of view on the aging experience, which often intersects with the experience of other crucial differences. The underlying idea is that being confronted with these points of view has an educational effect on the reader and thus society at-large.

At a certain point, however, I felt a growing discomfort with the claims of these reading practices, and this did not change even after I broadened my scope from representations of aging and later life in literary texts to photography, film, television, and performance, in the interdisciplinary setting of Maastricht University. I kept wondering whether the “de-” and “re-”construction of meaning in a variety of cultural texts could really advance social justice for older people who are, by and large, positioned as the problem of population aging. Despite engaging in outreach work through conventional formats such as public presentations or publications in periodicals, I became dissatisfied with the lack of scholarly connection between the images of fictional aging and the experiences of aging people around me. Analyses of representations of older characters in texts seemed far removed from the challenges that older people are faced with, especially the persistent pressure to age successfully by staying young forever—an expectation that many have internalized.

How could I not just write about older people but also collaborate and co-create knowledge with them? How could I connect academic discussions of artistic value and meaning with ordinary life and lay readings? I felt that cultural gerontology had something to offer in this regard.

Narrative as a Concept that Connects Literary and Cultural Gerontology

While literary gerontology refers to literary studies that implement age as a critical perspective, cultural gerontology encompasses social science approaches to the study of old age influenced by the cultural turn. Cultural gerontology builds on the notion that medical and chronological definitions of age are neither static nor fixed (Twigg & Martin, 2015, p. 2). For example, neoliberalism and consumerism have profoundly altered cultural and personal notions of aging in late modernity. The positioning of older people as a demographic that is a cause of alarm—a threat to the welfare state—originated in the nineteenth century (Katz, 1992), while the rise of third-age lifestyles to maintain health and productivity as long as possible is a product of the 1980s (Gilleard & Higgs, 2013). In order to move away from old age as a problematic category, cultural gerontology prioritizes the creation of “a fuller and richer account of later years … one that places the subjectivity of older people, the width and depth of their lives, at the forefront of analysis” (Twigg & Martin, 2015, p. 2). This phenomenological interest in the exploration of people’s subjectivities in combination with the metaphor of life as a story is among the reasons that cultural gerontology offers opportunities to build bridges with the humanities and literary studies of aging and later life. “Narrative” seems to be the magical concept that facilitates such exchanges (Falcus, 2015; Swinnen & Port, 2012). There is a broad consensus about the storied nature of human experience in both fields. People make sense of the world through narratives and use narrativity to constitute their identities, although we should be careful not to overemphasize narrative coherence for understandings of personhood since this can be detrimental to people who live with dementia, for example. Some would argue that cultural gerontology is influenced not only by the cultural turn but also by the narrative turn in the social sciences, which resulted in the emergence of narrative gerontology. I feel that it would be too far-reaching to delve into the distinction between cultural, narrative, and literary gerontology (and critical gerontology by extension) in such a short chapter. I would recommend Kate de Medeiros (2014) and Hannah Zeilig (2011) for more nuanced accounts; both scholars work at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences.

For a cultural gerontologist, narratives offer a specific type of knowledge that can be elicited in numerous ways, for instance, by means of qualitative interviewing, oral history, or ethnographic approaches that include participant observation and photovoice. Experiences and opinions that older people are able to voice through narrative do not exist in a vacuum, however. They are connected both to the larger master narratives (values and ideologies) about aging that circulate in our society and to the communities of people that we engage with and depend on to generate meaning. Consequently, what people articulate during an exchange with an interviewer or in the presence of a field worker is not necessarily an unmediated reflection of their private opinion. For this reason, it is also important to listen to and detect what cannot be spoken and to understand that during the processes of transcription and note-taking, narratives become disembodied and distanced from the moment in which they emerged (de Medeiros, 2014, p. 34). Another factor is that internalized ageism may make interviewees reluctant to talk about old age or they may verbally distance themselves from the topic by rehearsing normative age scripts that value individual agency and control, independence, productivity, agelessness, and permanent personhood. The cultural gerontologist, in contrast, hopes to move beyond these scripts through their research design. It is in this realm that the interpretative skills and inventiveness required of the cultural gerontologist are comparable to those of the literary scholar.

For a literary scholar, a narrative is not just any story but a narrator’s particular representation of a series of events which formal features or aesthetics are crucial to its meaning. Literary scholars are trained to situate literary works in the context of their production and to illuminate the ambiguities of fictional narratives, including life histories such as (auto)biographies and memoirs. Rita Felski (2015) has raised the question of whether some types of literary critique—and cultural critique in general—go too far by looking for hidden meanings in a text, which is, in a sense, the opposite extreme of taking texts at face value (cf. de Medeiros). Felski argues that the almost antagonistic attitude toward the literary artifact goes hand in hand with a disregard for ordinary readers “who persist in using these texts in unseemly or inappropriate fashion—identifying with characters, becoming absorbed in narratives, being struck by moments of recognition” (2015, p. 29). In other words, the antagonistic attitude would imply that both the ordinary reader, who presumably takes the text at face value, and the literary text itself are “oblivious to its … latent contradictions” (p. 66).

If connecting ordinary readers, personal life experiences, and embodied responses with literary texts is almost taboo in literary studies, how can we combine the study of narratives in relation to the lived experiences of older people in cultural gerontology with the oppositional readings of literary gerontologists? How can we bring the readings of so-called lay people and professionals together? I found great inspiration and some answers in the Fiction and Cultural Mediation of Ageing Project (FCMAP) at Brunel University.

The Methodology Behind FCMAP

A team of scholars affiliated with the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing conducted the FCMAP from May 2009 to February 2012. FCMAP examined “(1) the relationship between cultural representations of, and social attitudes to, ageing and (2) the potential of critical reflection and elective reading by older subjects for engendering new ways of thinking about ageing” (Hubble & Tew, 2013, Chapter 1, para. 1). It did so by means of what Nick Hubble and Philip Tew called “an innovative methodological bricolage” (Chapter 1, para. 1) that involved collaboration with the social research organization Mass Observation (MO), the Third Age Trust, and the think tank Demos. In my view, FCMAP’s methodological approach brought literary and cultural gerontology together in two ways. On the one hand, it made use of close readings of literary texts combined with an analysis of literary authors’ statements on the topic of old-age representations. These statements were elicited during a series of literary events staged specially for the project. On the other hand, FCMAP combined these “literary voices” with ways to collect, elicit, and analyze narratives of everyday life by collaborating with MO and the Third Age Trust.

Founded in 1937, MO is known for employing participatory research techniques to gauge public opinion in Postwar UK, for instance, through the combination of questionnaires and diaries that are kept over a longer period of time following clear instructions. FCMAP made use of the longitudinal qualitative data on aging already generated by Pat Thane in 1992 and 2000 via MO as well as 193 responses to newly developed instructions concerning representations of aging in political and media discourse. Additionally, in collaboration with the Third Age Trust, FCMAP set up eight groups with 80 volunteers in their early 60s–90s. Over the course of one year (2009–2010), the groups read nine novels published from 1944 to the present. These included, for example, Hanif Kureishi’s The Body (2002), Angela Carter’s Wise Children (1991), and Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn (1977). The participants kept diaries about the books and the group discussions; some of them attended literary events. Demos made the findings of the project available to policymakers in a 200-page report, Coming of Age (2011), which was also presented at several events to reach stakeholders. Many of them felt that the elicited narratives provided valuable information on age-related issues usually dealt with in a more top-down fashion (Hubble & Tew, 2013, Chapter 1, para. 9).

Experimenting with a Reading and Writing Club in Maastricht

In preparation for my inaugural lecture (Swinnen, 2017) as Endowed Socrates Chair in Humanism and the Art of Living at the University of Humanistic Studies, I decided to take a leap and pursue a modestly scaled project modeled after FCMAP. I wanted to experiment with data collection by forming a reading club (Fig. 1), particularly since I had already been studying cultural representations of aging in a variety of texts. My aim was to examine (1) reading experiences of people over 60 in the context of their lived experiences and (2) processes of critical reflection on aging, self, and society through reading, writing, and exchange. I launched a call for participation at the end of a public lecture that I gave for Vlam, a Maastricht organization specialized in literary events. After I informed ten aspiring participants about the work the project would require, eight signed up: six women and two men with an average age of 71, the youngest 61 and the oldest 82. All were highly educated except for one person who described his professional life as “many jobs that required manual rather than intellectual labor.” Two members were published authors of fiction, but rather than singling them out as FCMAP did, I had them work together with the other readers in a less hierarchical way.

Fig. 1
A collage includes some people, stars, clouds, thunder, written text and umbrellas.

Collage based on an illustration by Janneke Swinkels that was inspired by a photograph of the fieldwork with the reading club in 2017 © Swinnen

Full size image

For the data collection, for which I sought approval from the Ethical Review Committee Inner City of Maastricht University, I used two sets of questionnaires that participants filled out at the beginning and end of our collaboration. Examples of the questions posed included: What does aging mean to you? To what extent has participation in the book club changed your perception of later life? To what extent have you experienced sharing reading responses as enriching and why? Like the FCMAP volunteers, participants kept diaries throughout the reading process. The books that the reading club discussed included different types of prose around topics such as love in later life, elder suicide, late-life creativity, care and institutionalization, and dementia of a parent. We started with five literary works in Dutch, including Dimitri Verhulst’s Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill (Mevrouw Verona daalt de heuvel af, 2006) and Erwin Mortier’s Stammered Songbook: A Mother’s Book of Hours (Gestameld liedboek: Moedergetijden, 2011), and ended with three books originally written in English, which some of the participants read in translation, for example, Elisabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (2008). As the collaboration progressed, I gave book club members more of a say in the selection of the works. I asked participants to include any responses in their reading diaries that seemed of relevance to them, including how the literature evoked certain thoughts, recollections, and emotions.

Thus far, my methodological approach was fairly similar to FCMAP’s collaboration with volunteers through the Third Age Trust. However, I also made some changes, not only because I had a limited time span in which to run the project, but because I felt that I could further develop the FCMAP approach. Instead of the more unstructured book club meetings that Hubble and Tew (2013) preferred “[to minimize] the influence of researchers upon respondents” (Conclusion, para. 2), I chose a more structured approach modeled after a focus group interview. The underlying idea, nonetheless, remained that reading is a particular social event and that the exchange of reading experiences may deepen reflection on topics such as aging. I did not contribute as a reader to the focus group interview but chaired and moderated the discussion by asking open questions, for example, “What do we learn about the main character of the book?” and “Which excerpts would you single out as surprising or especially meaningful?” I made it clear to the participants that any response was welcome and that the aim of the conversation was not to arrive at a consensus. I refrained from providing my own interpretations of the novels even when members of the group explicitly asked for my expert opinion. The participants did not reflect on the group discussions in their reading diaries. Instead, all discussions were recorded and transcribed verbatim by my colleague Annette de Bruijn. This guaranteed a great amount of detail in the data on group discussions.

To further obtain information on how the participants experience aging and assess representations of aging, I added creative writing exercises to the questionnaires, reading diaries, and group discussions. My hypothesis was that creative writing exercises are another way to disclose hidden attitudes to aging as well as show participants’ reactions to how aging is represented in the literary texts. The participants were free to write about anything they wanted, but I also gave some options. For example, in relation to the novella Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill, which ends with the main character committing suicide by staying out in the freezing cold all night, I suggested rewriting the ending. One reader chose to let the protagonist live (Nono);Footnote 1 another introduced the perspective of a daughter coming to terms with Verona’s death (Cunera). In their questionnaires, participants noted that the creative writing exercises “appeal to your creativity and make you think about how and why the author chose and elaborated a particular storyline” (Aspirant) and they “force [you] to order [your] thoughts about what was written” (Simone). We used Dropbox to share all the reading diaries and creative writing exercises. Some participants also used Dropbox to upload reviews of the literary works and interviews with the authors in order to contextualize the literature list. I analyzed the entire data set through several rounds of close readings, as literary scholars are trained to do.

Some Findings About Experiences of and Attitudes Toward Aging

The primary aim of my experiment was to have a better understanding of how older people experience aging and what they think of aging. To do this, I engaged a new methodological approach consisting of an interactional setting that used literature as the departure point of conversation. Discussions about reading and writing assignments performed “a specific type of cultural work, for they enable participants to articulate or even discover who they are: their values, their aspirations, and their stance toward the dilemmas of their worlds” (Long, 2003, p. 145). My diverse data set definitely yielded a wealth of information in this regard that I will concisely summarize because it builds on the findings of Hubble and Tew. They end their book by optimistically speculating about

the emergence of a new social narrative of ageing, which both allows for long active post-retirement years and a gradual acceptance of old age, seen not as decrepitude or [a] social problem, but as the attainment of a self-acceptance that transcends any purely medical concept of well-being. In other words our public and social concept of successful ageing has to be revised. (Hubble & Tew, 2013, Conclusion, para. 2)

My data shows more of the ambiguity of the Dutch participants toward aging and how they together arrive at a basic understanding of ageism.

In terms of self-perception, all participants felt younger than their chronological age. Some connected this feeling explicitly with the notion of the “ageless self,” which is a rather problematic feature of the successful-aging paradigm because it suggests the presence of a stable self, unaffected by the experiences developed over time while trapped in an aging body (Gibbons, 2016). Cunera, for instance, writes in one of her questionnaires: “An older person is always still that much younger 20 or 30-year-old. When I meet older people, I am initially shocked by their grumpy, closed, worn-out appearance, but once I begin speaking with them, I always see the 30-year-old appear.” To maintain youthfulness, the participants agree that certain measures must be taken. As Nono puts it, “I am hard on my peers. I feel that you have a duty to make an effort to stay healthy and strong and mentally fit” (questionnaire). This emphasis on the duty to take responsibility over one’s own health and happiness is another troubling characteristic of the successful-aging paradigm. It denies the contingencies of life and the physical, relational, and existential vulnerabilities that people are confronted with throughout their life course. Nono continues with the warning that no one enjoys listening to bitter nostalgia or boring accounts of health issues. Evidently, this is what she associates with older people, a category to which she does not belong. Participants often mention dementia as the most horrifying and inhumane form of decline.

All these instances of stereotyping and distancing oneself from older people, especially those unable to live up to the ideal of successful aging as everlasting youthfulness, are indicative of what has been called internalized ageism. Although the participants showed sensitivity for other types of isms, such as sexism and racism, they were unfamiliar with the concept of ageism. This became most clear in their response to the international bestseller The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 83 ¼ Years Old (Pogingen iets van het leven te maken: Het geheime dagboek van Hendrik Groen, 83 ¼ jaar, 2014), an example of what is called “geezer and grump lit” (Swinnen, 2019). In this fictitious diary, the protagonist, Hendrik Groen, narrates his experiences in a retirement home in Amsterdam-Noord. To fight the meaninglessness of his institutionalization, Groen founds the Old-But-Not-Dead Club together with six other residents. They organize activities and outings exclusive to the club’s members, developing a sense of collective invincibility that is largely based on their dismissive attitude toward the home’s other residents. Most of the participants in my project did not appreciate the way that Groen talks about the residents who are not part of his club. They were appalled by the way he positions them, even though some of them used similar language when discussing other older people, especially in their questionnaires.

Let me unravel a bit more what initially seems to be a contradiction between the group’s response to Groen and their own attitudes toward older people. Vosje shared the impact of Groen’s narrative on her own experience of aging:

I started to look at myself through his eyes. How do others see me now? For instance, when I walk somewhere: are you still capable of walking down these stairs? And so on … [laughs uncomfortably]. You become more aware of your own aging, since we all age, of course. We can’t do anything about it. But that you are confronted with it in such a nasty way and then have to resist it. (Group discussion transcript, May 29, 2017)

With these words, Vosje addressed the lookism that underlies ageism. Her fellow reading club members, however, did not identify with her words because they felt they had nothing in common with the older people in the book. Still, they agreed that there are limits as to what can be said about older people and the term “old” itself became a subject of scrutiny. Participants wondered if it should be replaced by a more inclusive term, just as the term “non-Western immigrant” (niet-westerse allochtoon) has recently been replaced by Moroccan-Dutch or Turkish-Dutch citizen (Marokkaanse or Turkse Nederlander), for example. Winterfall noted how we are often unaware of the prejudice lurking behind words:

But such words—aren’t they hidden deep within us? Not long ago, there was the item “hidden racism” in the media. People who, without even knowing it, buried all kinds of fascist ideas and words deep inside their heads that you, with the right incentives [laughs], bring out again …. (Group discussion transcript, May 29, 2017)

The group then began to discuss sexist speech in The Secret Diary, which they found difficult to swallow. Winterfall wrote in one of his questionnaires, “women are (still) judged more than men on how they look. And men (still) on their economic value.” This idea returned during the group conversation. The dynamic among participants demonstrates how together and rather intuitively they arrived at a more nuanced and better understanding of the mechanisms of ageism and its intersection with sexism. However, it remained difficult for them to apply the terms “old” or “older” to themselves. This could suggest that reading fiction does not necessarily change internalized assumptions about aging or that older age is experienced in such diverse ways that readers do not automatically align themselves with older characters in fiction.

Circling Back to Literary Studies

Although my initial focus was people’s experiences of and attitudes toward aging, I quickly learned that the data I gathered and analyzed also revealed insights relevant to literary studies—reception studies to be precise—a field rarely connected to literary gerontology, to which I previously paid little attention.

Reception studies departs from the assumption that the meaning of a text does not reside in the literary work itself but emerges from the interaction between a text and a reader (Freund, 1987). It also claims that the background of each individual reader influences the production of meaning. Readers who share a similar background may be considered part of a specific “interpretative community” (Fish, 1980). What makes reception studies a forerunner to a postcritical approach in literary studies today (cf. Felski in this chapter) is its interest in ordinary readers, affective responses, and the potentially beneficial role of literature in people’s lives. One particular tendency within reception studies is a feminist approach to women’s reading practices. Janice E. Radway (1984), for instance, has shed light on women’s consumption of romance novels, while Elizabeth Long (2003) has examined the reading practices of American women participating in book clubs. Radway was among the first scholars to unravel how book club members combine the reception of literary works with personal experience in a process of collective self-reflection that “enables self-discovery and collective affirmation” (Long, 2003, p. 146).

Although my reading and writing group, for people over 60 rather than just women, was established specifically for the research project, the data does reveal what values the participants ascribed to reading together. I could identify at least four. Firstly, they explained how a book club offers the opportunity to meet interesting and like-minded older people who prefer in-depth discussions to small talk (about ailments and grandchildren). Secondly, the participants described the importance of being confronted with other people’s responses and points of view with which to compare one’s own experiences. Nono wrote, for instance:

I enjoy my book clubs because we exchange our reading experiences. It is always very nice to hear other insights and to share your own with others. And, it is also wonderful to tell and hear about experiences that we recognize from our own lives. Such discussions can become heated, because they occasionally reveal views, norms, and values. (Questionnaire)

Some acknowledged that a reader’s background, such as their education or profession, influences the reading experience. Thirdly, the participants claimed that such comparisons and exchanges of responses result in new insights that can be inspirational and enriching. This is what Long calls “intersubjective creation/accomplishment” (2003, p. 145). Cunera even addressed how a shared reading experience results in a type of catharsis:

Alone is but alone. Only through interaction with others you become milder, stronger, more helpful, and are helped in return … Through a book’s message, catharsis takes place in a very safe, pleasant way. You can compare it to a room where you collectively listen to music. I suspect that discussing a book creates a more peaceful bond than watching a football game. (Questionnaire)

Lastly, being part of a reading community provided participants a sense of respect and belonging. Several readers indicated the importance of feeling appreciated and intellectually valued—more difficult as one ages—through participation in a book club.

From here it follows that participants first and foremost shared a “cognitive motive” (Duyvendak, 2005) for joining the reading group. The fondness for collective knowledge production may not be so surprising given that my participants consciously decided to engage with a research project. This begs the question as to what extent the project itself intervened in their lives—a question I was frequently asked when presenting the project to aging studies scholars who expected some kind of therapeutic effect. Most people reported in their final questionnaires that participation in the project itself did not really (or significantly) change their perceptions and experiences of aging. But they experienced a focus on representations of aging in prose as an eye-opener. Except for one of the published writers already familiar with my work prior to her involvement in the study, not one member of the reading group had ever paid attention to how the lives of older characters are depicted in literature and how they might be affected by these portrayals.

Their collective reflection on a selection of literary representations of aging gave insight into the role of recognition in this shared reading practice. I am not referring to the sudden joy experienced when discovering certain similarities with a character. Recognition is here understood as “acknowledgment,” described by Felski as “a claim for acceptance, dignity, and inclusion” (2008, p. 29). Systematically looking into the ways aging is portrayed prompted the readers to come up with very clear ethical guidelines for authors to commit to representations that are more just. They recommended refraining from generalizations, which result in dangerous stereotypes and caricatures. As Simone formulated it in a questionnaire: “For example, if it is always written that physicality/sensuality diminishes as you get older, and you yourself have a different idea about it, that can give someone the impression that they are ‘not normal.’” Cunera wrote: “I see too many caricatures in literature. It already begins with drawings for toddlers: grandmas and grandpas are all crooked, with glasses and a stick. All slow and too sweet and too understanding” (questionnaire). Instead, authors should pay attention to the differences between older people and how they experience aging.

The focus on the cognitive motive does not mean there was no interest in aesthetics (cf. Duyvendak’s “aesthetic motives”). The participants were avid and experienced readers; most were part of other book clubs, some of which had already existed for 20 years. In general, they agreed on what a good reading and a good book entailed. Their unwritten literary views—rather similar to a literary critic’s assumptions—were used as a yardstick. Many readers, for instance, shared an interest in the author of the book, but they clearly distinguished between the narrator and the author. Knowing a little more about the author can shed new light on the work, though most readers agreed that the book itself is central rather than the author’s intention or worldview. Simone gave the example of Louis-Ferdinand Céline who “wrote beautiful works but had despicable ideas about Jews” (questionnaire). Furthermore, project participants agreed that a literary work should not be confused with reality. At best, it offers a possible world in words that “offers an amplification of all variations of beauty, horror, and possible changes” (Cunera, questionnaire). There was also a tacit understanding of what a well-written book looks like: it offers enough gaps for the reader to interpret it in their own way. Even when they disapproved of the content, participants agreed that well-written books are a pleasure to read.

There was one outsider to this reading community (not the male participant with a different background) for whom enchantment trumped knowledge production. Her more hedonistic reading experiences—especially of the middlebrow novel The Secret Diary—were sometimes harshly judged by other readers. Still, this participant was equally vocal on how diverse and inclusive representations of aging characters should be—she was just more forgiving of stereotypes and norm-affirming humor.

Conclusion

Hubble and Tew’s “methodological bricolage” developed in the framework of FCMAP inspired me to embark on research activities—especially the gathering of data—departing from what is common practice in literary gerontology. It enabled me to rethink the value of ordinary readers’ responses to fiction and question the hierarchical division between lay and professional readers. It also allowed me to discover the potential of reception studies to develop a postcritical approach to literary representations of aging and later life. Most importantly, though, it helped me to include older peoples’ perspectives and experiences in humanities approaches to the study of aging. As I am finishing this piece, I have embarked on a new project called “Shared Reading in Times of Lockdown” in collaboration with De Culturele Apotheek (NL) and Bond zonder naam (BE). I will study the dynamics of reading groups spanning different generations that respond to poetry and prose on the topic of isolation. At the same time, there are projects emerging in Spain (Maricel Oró-Piqueras and Emma Domínguez-Rué), Sweden (Linn Sandberg and Karin Lövgren), Denmark (Peter Simonson), and Germany (Anita Wohlmann) that work with reading groups for people over 60 to discuss topics like resilience, late-life masculinity, and retirement. The future will determine how they will contribute to the innovation of literary and cultural gerontology, aging studies, and literary studies.