Age Studies, Part One

Accuracy in Academia ^ | January 12, 2010 | Bethany Stotts

[bs9021]

Age Studies, Part One

Bethany Stotts, January 12, 2010

Since its inception Accuracy in Academia has catalogued the inner politics of a series of Humanities disciplines, including women’s studies, queer studies, fat studies, labor studies, and others. This article will introduce a lesser-known Humanities field: age studies.

A recent panel at the 2009 Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention offers clues as to what literary scholars consider the norm in this discipline:

“Temporal Drag” in Ghost World

Lecturing on the “ghostlike” period of adolescence post-high school graduation, University of Sussex professor Pamela Thurschwell reflected on the difference between Daniel Clowe’s profanity-laced comic Ghost World and its cult-classic companion film. “The graphic novel focuses on the gradually unravelling relationship between the two girls, while Terry Zwigoff’s film lessens the fusional homoerotic intensity of that friendship by giving Enid a competing friendship romance with the nerdy collector, the anachronistic Seymour, played by Steve Buscemi in one of the roles that Steve Buscemi always plays,” says Prof. Thurschwell. “Both film and book represent the post-high school world of the late adolescent as a space that may be impossible to occupy except as a kind of ghost.”

Actually, in the comic issue “Punk Day” (caution: obscenity), Clowe depicts Enid as saying “Maybe we should be lesbos!” to which Rebecca immediately responds, “Get away from me!” (emphasis in original). She later offers Enid an alternative way to deal with her sexual tension....