A Hermeneutic Perspective on the Study of Late Life Experience (Literary Gerontology)

Introduction. One of the unsolved global problems of our time is the mass aging of the entire population of the planet. One of the important types of knowledge created to solve this problem was gerontology, which began to be constituted as a positivist-oriented science, gradually incorporating the fields of humanities and art into its boundaries. Content. An alternative to traditional gerontology in the last quarter of the twentieth century was the critical and humanistic versions of late-life research, which sought new ways of understanding old age to improve the quality of life in later life. One of the productive directions of the development of the intentions of the humanistic paradigm in gerontology was literary gerontology, a field of research within which the attitude to aging reflected in literature is analyzed; the influence of aging on the creativity of authors is considered (the phenomenon of "late style" in creativity is studied); The transformational possibilities of aging are investigated based on biographical literary forms. The topic of this article is to consider the conditions for the formation of literary gerontology: the reasons for the emergence of interest in the study of aging, reflected in the literature; the directions of its development; the methodological basis of this field; the leading authors who formed its boundaries and content. Conclusions. To a first approximation, literary gerontology can be described as a set of traditions of interpreting the connection between aging and creativity through careful reading of literary texts. Literary gerontology is an important part of the field of age studies and plays an important role in the study of the subjective, phenomenological side of the aging process. She enriches gerontological knowledge by bringing new methodologies to the understanding of many aspects of later life.