Baudrillard, Youth, and American Film: Fatal Theory and Education (Kip Kline)

Kline's book Baudrillard, Youth, and American Film starts out with a rather provocative statement: "These are desperate times for children and adolescents" (p. 1).Though this statement is somewhat problematic in my mind-in that it always seems that young people are in desperate times according to the adult world-Kline's book is genuine in its contention that the North American West, though steeped in a rhetoric of "what's best for the children" (p.1), is actually, and has always been, rather hostile towards young people.Young human beings are generally assumed to be in a period of rebellious transgression and/or complete and utter confusion.Whether adolescence is naturally imbued with a defiant and rebellious tendency or these dispositions are adopted by youth through countless years of adult suggestion and imposition, the adolescent subject, or "teenager," is typically perceived as unable to understand how the world operates; that is, how to see things from an adult perspective.It is of course not adolescents who make such claims about themselves, but the adults who write about them, for them, and most importantly, as them.Kline's book is unexpectedly unique in its analysis of adults' representation of teens through Baudrillard's radical social theory and philosophical system.Though the book emphasizes Baudrillard's theory of media and provides rare insights into the depiction of adolescents in American teen movies of the past forty years, it is Kline's main argument that makes his book so alluring.He contends that these cinematic depictions produce very troubling results, "namely the contributions they make to the discursive violence towards young people that ends up finding an entrenched space in adult-controlled modern institutions" (p.2).Throughout modernity, young people have been represented through a vast array of cultural products and materials; a fairly specific discourse of youth has been delineated through everything from early chapbook adventures like the Cornish fairy tale Jack the Giant Slayer (1760) to the ubiquitous reproductions staged through teen mini-series (such as creator Brian Yorkey's teen suicide mystery drama, 13 Reasons Why (2017).Kline suggests that "contemporary American movies often contribute to the post-modernization of some of G. Stanley Hall's more dubious claims about Adolescence" (p. 2).Indeed, Hall's theories-mainly taken from his Adolescence: Its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (1905)-continue to hold tremendous clout in how the adult world tends to understand young people.Hall viewed adolescence as a period of inner turmoil and vulnerability-seemingly referencing Goethe's classic Sturm und Drung (Storm and Stress) novels like The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)-requiring adult supervision and

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.