Overview

This collection takes its inspiration from Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, a landmark critique of American culture at the end of the 1950s. Goodman called for a revival of social investment in urban planning, public welfare, workplace democracy, free speech, racial harmony, sexual freedom, popular culture, and education to produce a society that could inspire young people, and an adult society worth joining. In postmodernity, Goodman's enlightenment-era vision of social progress has been judged obsolete. For many postmodern critics, subjectivity is formed and expressed not through social investment, but through consumption; the freedom to consume has replaced political empowerment. But the power to consume is distributed very unevenly, and even for the affluent it never fulfills the desire produced by the advertising industry. The contributors to this volume focus on adverse social conditions that confront young people in postmodernity, such as the relentless pressure to consume, social dis-investment in education, harsh responses to youth crime, and the continuing climate of intolerance that falls heavily on the young. In essays on education, youth crime, counseling, protest movements, fiction, identity-formation and popular culture, the contributors look for moments of resistance to the subsumption of youth culture under the logic of global capitalism.

Full Product Details

Author:   Ronald Strickland ,  Jennifer Drake ,  Henry A. Giroux ,  Margaret Henderson
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint:   Rowman & Littlefield
Dimensions:   Width: 15.00cm , Height: 1.50cm , Length: 22.50cm
Weight:   0.354kg
ISBN:  

9780742516519

ISBN 10:   0742516512
Pages:   272
Publication Date:   25 June 2002
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

"Part 1 Introduction: What's Left of Modernity? Chapter 2 1 ""A Caste, A Culture, A Market"": Youth, Marketing and Lifestyle in Postwar America Chapter 3 2 The War on the Young: Coorporate Culture, Schooling and the Politics of ""Zero Tolerance"" Chapter 4 3 Richard Price and the Ordeal of the Postmodern City Chapter 5 4 ""Remorseless Young Predators"": The Bottom Line of Caging Children Chapter 6 5 Growing Up Incarcerated: The Prison-Industrial Complex and Literacy as Resistance Chapter 7 6 Ideology and Interpellation in the First-Person Shooter Chapter 8 7 Trouble Child: Barthes' Imagined Youth Chapter 9 8 The Big Business of Surfing's Oceanic Feeling: Thirty Years ofTracks Magazine Chapter 10 9 Female Adolescence and its Discontents Chapter 11 10 The Mis/Education of Righteous Babes: Popular Culture and Third Wabe Feminism Chapter 12 11 Post ""68: Theory in the Streets Chapter 13 12 To Be Young, Countercultural and Black: Radical Pluralism, Countercultures and African American Activism in the 1960s"

Reviews

Children are the collateral damage in a war that an affluent, unjust society has been waging under the sign of neoliberalism. This book presents the informed, incisive voices raised in protest.--Amitava Kumar

Author Information

Ronald Strickland is professor of English and the director of graduate studies at Illinois State University.

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