Afterword

Summary

Aging, Duration, and the English Novel concludes by comparing the affordances of cinema and the novel as they relate to the representation of aging. Emerging near the end of this study’s historical focus, cinema offered new formal possibilities for capturing the process of growing old. Returning to the question of duration through a discussion of Woolf’s, Bergson’s, and Deleuze’s writing on cinema, this section teases out the formal arguments about narrative explored in the previous chapters. In fact, the comparison between cinematic and textual narrative underlines this book’s thesis: that the affordances of form structure historically specific possibilities—affective, social, and political—for older people. The afterword also affirms an expanded version of this thesis by arguing that age—as a biocultural process—serves as a form with its own ability to organize human life and read texts.