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Literacy Narratives and Age Identity Across the Life Span

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Abstract

Literacy narratives, which frequently overlap with language memoirs and the Bildungsroman, represent moments of transition in an individual’s life course in which the acquisition of language or literacy is vital to their development and upward social mobility. As this chapter illustrates, literacy narratives also foreground age identification as one of the many consequences of desiring, acquiring, or lacking privileged literacies. For example, the achievement of adulthood status is often predicated upon particular literacy achievements. Through rhetorical analysis of two popular examples of the literacy-narrative genre (Tara Westover’s Educated [2018] and Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader in English translation [1997]), this chapter considers the rhetorical force of pairing tropes of age and literacy. Ultimately, this chapter presents rhetorical analysis as a useful method for tracing age meanings in popular discourses, and further invites readers to consider what social action literacy narratives perform to (re)shape cultural perceptions of age.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Schlink’s decision for Hanna’s character to be illiterate—and thus to permit a reading of her as somehow less culpable for her role in genocide—is controversial. Although discussion of this choice is beyond the scope of this essay, see Cynthia Ozick and Kim L. Worthington for a sample exchange on this issue.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA

    Lauren Marshall Bowen

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  1. Lauren Marshall Bowen
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Correspondence to Lauren Marshall Bowen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, University of South Florida, Sarasota, FL, USA

    Valerie Barnes Lipscomb

  2. Department of Literature and Art, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Aagje Swinnen

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Bowen, L.M. (2024). Literacy Narratives and Age Identity Across the Life Span. In: Lipscomb, V.B., Swinnen, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50917-9_5

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