Anita Wohlmann (2014). Aged Young Adults. Age Readings of Contemporary American Novels and Films. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 261 pp. ISBN 978 3 8376 2483 0 (paperback)

摘要

In Aged Young Adults, Anita Wohlmann aims to explore an area within agestudies that has received little attention so far: age awareness in charactersthat are in their twenties and thirties. Age critics tend to focus on old age,that is, from sixty years old onwards. By age-awareness, Wohlmann refersnot only to the negative connotations that Western culture has attributedto old age and the aging process in general but also to those roles andbehaviour, appearance and objectives, which are considered appropriate fora specific age. In that sense, Wohlmann’s study represents a step forwardin the study of age and aging from a cultural point of view. Departing fromJanice Sokoloff’s The Margin That Remains: A Study of Aging in Literature,Wohlmann extends Sokoloff’s thesis by focusing on recent American novelsand films that have appeared in the first decades of the new millennium.By looking at Joel Zwick’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Sam Mendes’s AwayWe Go, Miranda July’s The Future and It Chooses You, Jonathan Franzen’sThe Corrections, Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, Tom Perrotta’s Little Childrenand Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision, Wohlmann discerns the narrativeconventions as well as the cultural discourses through which the youngcharacters of each of these works express a conflictual relationship to their chronological age, and analyses to what extent capitalism and consumer culture dictate the achievements each life stage presupposes.