Review of 'Aged Young Adults: Age Readings of Contemporary American Novels and Films' by Anita Wohlmann

Abstract

Anita Wohlmannn's Aged Young Adults: Age Readings of Contemporary AmericanNovels and Films makes a welcome addition to both the burgeoning study of aging and old age, and the Aging Studies series imprint.This book offers an insightful study of ruptures to normative paradigms of the life course posed by the chronologically youthful who bear, or refuse, culturally specific signs and practices of aging.Through a range of cross-media case studies that include "silver rush" subcultures, popular American literature, and film, Wohlmann's analysis teases out the fluid attributions of "too old" or "too immature" in relation to chronologically based assumptions of life stage behaviors.In doing so, she undermines the easy assumptions that age is "a simple, descriptive feature with no further meaning or function" (27), while also dislocating "aging" from biologically determined alignments with chronology, which, following Hartung and Kunow, Wohlmann terms the "chronocentric view" (39).The book is interdisciplinary in its approach.For instance, a wonderful elaboration of metaphor is drawn from literary studies, with Wohlmann's "age reading" methodology indebted to luminaries of cultural gerontology and aging studies: Gullette, Woodward, Sontag, and Katz are among the key theorists deployed.Wohlmann describes her methodology as one that "tries to understand metaphors of age by focussing on fictional age narratives," while juxtaposing "these narratives with discourses, theories and concepts from sociology, psychology, or cultural studies" (73).This methodology also governs the structure of the book, and its chapters are positioned in a dialogic relationship, each informing the other in a web of interlinked arguments and expositions.A highly effective introduction based on "silver rush" fashions clearly establishes the book's basic premise that a pervasive disjuncture between chronological age and discourses of life-stage appropriateness can be recognized in contemporary fictional narratives.

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