Growing Up Postmodern: Neoliberalism and the War on the Young
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.
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Growing Up Postmodern: Neoliberalism and the War on the Young
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.
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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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780742516502
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date: 06/25/2002
Series: Culture and Politics Series
Pages: 272
Product dimensions: 6.38(w) x 9.18(h) x 0.78(d)

About the Author

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

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
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