ABSTRACT
In the growing canon of novels, plays, poetry and memorial texts that constitute the imaginative literature of the popularly termed Alzheimer's epidemic, depictions of living and dying with dementia are intimately bound up with the meanings of family and care in a period in which structural transformations, neoliberalisation and, more recently, austerity have placed intolerable pressures upon the capacity of people to support one another both materially and emotionally. This chapter sets out to consider the ethical and epistemological questions with which people are presented by literary fiction that seeks to communicate the subjective experience of living with dementia using first person narration by a character with dementia. In terms of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, the impact of the popular dissemination and assimilation of neuroscientific epistemologies can be seen in the work of the French theorist Catherine Malabou.
