Politics of Aging in American Literature

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The aim of this project was to establish the politics of aging in the study of American Literature in Japan. The politics of aging is based on the new understanding of aging proposed by American feminists in 1990s. This new view holds that aging is not a natural phenomenon but in fact constituted by social ideology. This view brings about new dimensions of aging where we have multiple choices of the way of our aging. However, these choices are not available in the free private space but always in the political field of social discourse. Hence the importance of the idea of politics of aging, by which we can make clear just this political nature of aging. The idea is also useful for providing a new insight to the study of American Literature. By focusing on how characters reflect the political nature of aging or the way authors decide their own way of aging, the idea of politics of aging brings forth new field in the study of American Literature.The most important achievement of our project is a book we published in 2012, The Politics of Aging in American Literature(In Japanese. Ed. Satoshi Kanazawa. Kyoto: Shorai-sha, 2012). In this book we collect ten papers, each of which sheds a new light on some works of modern American Literature by focusing various aspects of aging reflected in these works. This is really an important step to establish the politics of aging in American Literature Study in Japan and invigorate the academic filed by introducing the new point of argument. Thus we have made a significantachievement by this project.