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'Deconstructing the Life Course: An Introduction to Literary Age Studies' - Yauheniya Lekarevich

When

Jan 29, 2026 from 02:00 to 04:00 (Europe/Berlin / UTC100)

Where

SR 126 (GCSC)

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While literary studies have long engaged with identity categories like gender, race, and class, age often remains a transparent, unexamined lens through which we read. This workshop introduces Literary Age Studies, a critical field that interrogates age not as a biological inevitability but as a system of cultural meanings, social scripts, and power relations. The first part of this workshop will establish a theoretical foundation. We will survey foundational works and concepts that enable us to analyze the life course as a social construct. We will focus on how this construction often establishes adulthood as a normative, 'unmarked' destination, an invisible middle, while framing both youth and old age as marginalized states of 'becoming' or 'declining.' This dynamic renders the experiences of the young and the old hyper-visible and problematic, while adulthood operates as a silent, presumed norm. To illustrate these concepts, the second part will turn to a targeted case study: the rise of Young Adult (YA) and New Adult (NA) fiction. These genres serve as potent examples of the social and market construction of age, revealing how life stages can be defined, packaged, and sold. We will discuss how these market-driven categories both reflect and shape our cultural imagination, exposing inconsistencies in how we envision the journey from adolescence to adulthood.
Participants will leave with a critical vocabulary and a new analytical framework, ideal for researchers seeking to incorporate the dimension of age into their literary analysis.

Please sign up via Stud.IP.