Teenage Time

Adolescence has been codified as an unpredictable, experimental and liminal time. Teenage Time reads this phase as queer in its framing and disruption of developmental narratives of modernity, showing that the identity of the teenager, as it has been culturally perceived in different epochs developing since the 1940s, has shaped the temporal imaginary of the 20th and 21st century. From the conception of the teenager after the Second World War, through notions of rebellion and consumption peaking in the 1980s and 1990s, to representations of their precarious futures amidst the political, social, economic and environmental uncertainties of today, Pamela Thurschwell exposes British and American representations of the adolescent as both destructive and recursive in their disturbance of narrative and teleology in literature, film and sub-cultural history. Calling on theories of queer temporality, time studies, psychoanalysis and Marxist accounts of modernity, this book traces how the teenager is ''out of time'' and time-travelling, commodified, anarchic, future less , precarious with an uneven distribution of time in relation to race, and how they confront dystopias in Young Adult catastrophe literature. Covering a wide range of works, this book features contemporary and YA fiction such as The Member of the Wedding , American Pastoral , Sula, The Hate U Give , The Fault in Our Stars, How I Live Now, Never Let Me Go, The Hunger Games and They Both Die at the End , and films including Donnie Darko , The Breakfast Club , Back to the Future , Say Anything and Ghost World . Original and conceptually sophisticated, Thurschwell demonstrates how adolescence is formed in dialogue with a crisis in and of historical time, revealing the promise and destruction of the modern teenager.

Auteur
Pamela Thurschwell is Reader in English, and Head of Department at the University of Sussex, UK. She is the author of Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 18801920 (2001) and Sigmund Freud (2000) and the editor of Quadrophenia and Mod(ern) Culture (2017). She has published widely on 19th, 20th and 21st-century literature, adolescence, and popular culture and has most recently edited a cluster for the journal Post 45 on the TV show Bojack Horseman.

Contenu

Introduction: Adolescents are out of time

Chapter One: Creative destruction: post-war teenage anarchy

Chapter Two: About the young idea: the all-consuming teenage ball

Chapter Three: Generation time bomb: the terrifying teenage girl

Chapter Four: Keep your back to the future: neoliberalism and the teen time travel movie

Chapter Five: Black lives shattered: arrested time and black adolescence

Chapter Six: Making out in Anne Frank's house: teen romance and catastrophic history

Coda: The Rise and Fall of Teenage Time

Bibliography

Index