To be wise these days about age and ageism, one starts (as these essays do) from the proposition that all of life is relational. Life itself often depends on this fact. Social support must start with the newborn infant and, as the Covid-19 era of excess deaths in later life painfully reminds us, must continue throughout life to the best possible end (Gullette, “Avoiding”). To those with increasing cognitive impairment, neglect worsens every phase of the condition. Without adequate support, no human being can form a self, maintain selfhood, or make progress however defined at any age. “Selfhood” is often an individualist concept – when what we need, in Elizabeth Barry’s words, is “a way beyond the monadic self” (p. 134), an unshakeable belief in the existential value of the self-in-connection. To be human is to need support; to be human is to offer it.

This ethical stance leads to the overarching reasons why age studies needs literary-cultural studies. And vice versa. Age and all its intersections across the entire life course are still, to put it mildly, ill defined. Old age remains the most mysterious phase of existence, and ageism the most acceptable bias of society. In the Age of Alzheimer’s, even the boon of democratized longevity can be made to seem frightening. “Anxiety about what may come … is [often] located in the figure of an old person,” Sarah Falcus correctly notes in her essay here (p. 71). People believe universalizing statements about later life and about old people that are incorrect, ahistorical, acultural, asocial – and damaging. Without persistent close attention to the cultural and historical conditions in which people grow old, there is no way that everyone – including the most vulnerable – can remain, as they should, “within our social embrace” (Taylor). Representation in creative writing, and its analysis in literature and cultural studies, need to offer precisely this sort of attention. In tandem, they can improve our society’s ability to think age and defy ageism by casting doubt on perverse if conventional “truths.”

Reading Fiction: Its Dangers and Our Disappointments

Some people believe imaginative literature, more or less. Naively, long before the resurgence of critical study of character and identity, I used to take fictional personas as real.