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THE MIDLIFE AGE CLASS AND THE MIDLIFE MUDDLE Looking over the vast explosion of midlife discourse, both popular and scholarly, that has become such a feature of seventies', eighties', and nineties' common sense in the United States, a cultural inquirer cannot help but observe that the boom has created as well as targeted an audience for the messages. 1 At first glance, it is a group that the mainstream press now regularly labels the" aging baby boomers," referring to persons born in the decades between 1946 and 1964. But in fact the audience now also includes people over fifty and even under thirty who are overhearing the same discourses. There is a vast age class being constructed to pay attention to midlife discourse, 2 which is available at practically any level of literacy or of verbal or visual impressionability.

An age class is a culturally constructed unit whose unity is proposed or posited as, precisely, not depending upon any category other than" age." It is different from a cohort or generation as previously known (cf. the Lost Generation or the Depression babies). What the members of the new midlife age class are said to have in common is certainly