Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media

Vanessa Joosen

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781496837967
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496815170
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Contributions by Gökçe Elif Baykal, Lincoln Geraghty, Verónica Gottau, Vanessa Joosen, Sung-Ae Lee, Cecilia Lindgren, Mayako Murai, Emily Murphy, Mariano Narodowski, Johanna Sjöberg, Anna Sparrman, Ingrid Tomkowiak, Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer, Ilgim Veryeri Alaca, and Elisabeth Wesseling Media narratives in popular culture often assign interchangeable characteristics to childhood and old age, presuming a resemblance between children and the elderly. These designations in media can have far-reaching repercussions in shaping not only language, but also cognitive activity and behavior. The meaning attached to biological, numerical age—even the mere fact that we calculate a numerical age at all—is culturally determined, as is the way people "act their age." With populations aging all around the world, awareness of intergenerational relationships and associations surrounding old age is becoming urgent. Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media caters to this urgency and contributes to age literacy by supplying insights into the connection between childhood and senescence to show that people are aged by culture. Treating classic stories like the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales and Heidi; pop culture hits like The Simpsons and Mad Men; and international productions, such as Turkish television cartoons and South Korean films, contributors explore the recurrent idea that "children are like old people, " as well as other relationships between children and elderly characters as constructed in literature and media from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This volume deals with fiction and analyzes language as well as verbally sparse, visual productions, including children's literature, film, television, animation, and advertising.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. United by God and Nature: Johanna Spyri’s Heidi and Her Relationship with the Elderly
• 2. Happily Ever After for the Old in Japanese Fairy Tales
• 3. Vitalizing Childhood through Old Age in Hector Malot’s Sans famille: An Intersectional Perspective
• 4. The Right to Self-Determination: Ageism in Two Dutch Children’s Books on the Voluntary Death of Elderly People
• 5. Extremely Close Generations: Childhood and Old Age in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Novel
• 6. The “Strawberry Generation”: Two Views on Intergenerational Relations in Post–Cold War Taiwan
• 7. Intergenerational Bonding in Recent Films from South Korea
• 8. Mischief and Mayhem: A Cultural History of the Relationship between Children and Old People in the Contemporary Family Film
• 9. Grandparents and Grandchildren in The Simpsons: Intergenerational Rupture and Prefigurative Culture
• 10. Sustaining and Transgressing Borders: The Relationship between Children and the Elderly in Mad Men
• 11. Representations of Intergenerational Relationships in Children’s Television in Turkey: Inquiries and Propositions
• 12. “It’s Disgusting!”: Children Enacting Mixed-Age Differences in Advertising
• Notes on Contributors
• Index