Speaker
Description
Literature does not only reflect, represent, or reveal aspects of age and the life course as conceptualized by a given society, but also affects the latter’s dominant age system through illocutionary forces that either reinforce or destabilize it. In my paper, I trace, firstly, the operation of such forces in a small selection of canonical English poems occasioned by the Great War, namely two of Rudyard Kipling’s war epithets (1919), Wilfred Owen’s “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young” (1920), and A. E. Housman’s “Here dead we lie because we did not choose” (1922). All of these poems are concerned with the relations between different age groups in society. By blaming the old for the deaths of the so-called lost generation and casting the war as, primarily, an act of inter-age betrayal, they call into question the props of a contemporary age inequality that remains widely accepted today. They thus provide an unusually stark example of what I refer to as literary age group politics. Having traced the details of these politics in the poems by way of close reading, I, secondly, outline a few more covert and generalizable ways in which age group politics can operate through literature. My very brief textual illustrations here include Shakespeare’s second history tetralogy, Emily Dickinson’s poem “I’m wife,” and the genre of biography, both fictional and non-fictional.
The sociological framework and reference point of my analysis is Matilda Riley et al.’s extensive account of age stratification (Aging and Society, vol. 3. New York: Russell Sage, 1972), which – prominent later work notwithstanding – I still consider the most rigorous and convincing theorization of the social dynamics of age. In its holistic concern with potential conflicts between age groups and the mechanisms which keep societies from fracturing along age lines, it usefully complements more narrowly focused advocacy-based approaches or those that centre predominantly on individual experiences of the life course. Nevertheless the life course and its narrativization still play an important role in my paper, namely as central components of the “conflict-reducing mechanism” that Riley et al. describe as “linkages through aging and cohort succession” (443). Insofar as it helps us to recall past life phases and anticipate future ones, and with these the corresponding age group affiliations, literature in the broad sense of imaginative narrative must surely rank among the foremost cultural media through which such linkages are forged.
| Principal domain of study | English literary studies |
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