How rebellious, really, is American youth culture?
‘Youth is happy, because it has the ability to see beauty. When this ability is lost, wretched old age begins, decay, unhappiness’ (Franz Kafka, qtd, in Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, translated by Goronwy Rees, Derek Verschoyle Ltd., 1953, p. 33). Where do you see beauty in American youth culture, and what does it signify?
‘For two or three hours, the sun lay warmly in the high window, showing Jo seated on the old sofa, writing busily’ (Louisa M. Alcott, Little Women, Dent, 1970 [1869-69, 1880], p. 133). Explore the significance in American texts of your choice of young people doing one of the following: a) writing, b) painting, c) making films or videos, d) producing music, e) blogging.
Explore the meanings of nostalgia in American youth culture.
Henry Jenkins says of ‘textual poachers’ that they ‘do not observe from the distance (be it physical, emotional, or cognitive); they trespass upon others’ property; they grab it and hold onto it; they internalize its meanings and remake these borrowed terms’ (Textual Poachers, Routledge, 1992, p. 62). How meaningful and how powerful, would you say, are young people’s activities of textual poaching (evidenced in such domains as fan fiction and fan music video)?
In the film, The Wild One (dir. László Benedek, 1953), young US bikers baffle an elderly bartender with their rapid ‘jive-talking’. Does contemporary Internet English, with its textisms, its emojis, etc., amount to a similar secret code of the young?
Study Activities
Though the Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation of the term ‘Teen Ager’ dates from as far back as 1913, uses of ‘teen’ and its affiliate words proliferated in America after the Second World War. In the 1950s, teenagers became an important market for corporate interests and a significant demographic for sociologists and educationists. We are familiar with several American teen representations that have lasted from this era, including rock ’n’ classics and J. D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye. Only period specialists, however, are knowledgeable with regard to the everyday, ephemeral stuff of 1950s’ teen culture. To begin filling in this blank, take a look at the December 1956 issue of Teen: The Magazine for Young Americans. Consider the racial, gender and class profiles of the implied audience, and identify the teen interests and preoccupations suggested by the magazine’s content.
In our chapter we consider the importance of spatial denotation in notable representations of American youth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: how certain sites may hold out prospects of liberation for the young (the Mississippi River in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, say, or the garret in Little Women), while others communicate the adult world’s authority (e.g. the parental home and the police station in Nicholas Ray’s film, Rebel Without a Cause). Take three or four twenty-first-century narratives of the young in America with which you are familiar – novels, short stories, films, TV shows, etc. – and explore their spatial imaginations. What are the key sites of dissidence and resistance now? By contrast, what are the main centres of social control?
Like any cinematic genre, the category of ‘the American teen film’ is loose and provisional. It is helpful, nevertheless, as a device for bringing together US films of different periods and moods that have in common a preoccupation with the condition of the young. Compile your own list of ten teen films that you believe are significant and illuminating. Prepare some remarks on each of them to justify your selections to your audience or reader.
Adult commentators have often passed critical comment on young people’s life on the internet, casting this as passive and impoverishing. To test this thinking, begin by selecting an online platform with which you are familiar. Go on to offer a detailed account of its culture: you might consider, for example, its demographic (who is made welcome on the platform?), its outlook (is the platform committed to progressive positions?), its modes of communication (can you make your voice heard – and heard, moreover, as part of an open, generous conversation?). Can you argue reasonably that your chosen platform is even part of what has been called a ‘counter-public sphere’ (or, in the American philosopher Nancy Fraser’s term, a ‘subaltern counterpublic’), offering an opportunity for the kind of liberating social interaction that may have shrivelled in the world offline?
Choose an example of American culture addressed (at least partly) to the young that you are enthusiastic about and respond to it, not in critical mode, but creatively by producing your own piece of fan fiction. If inspiration is needed, look at websites such as Archive of Our Own and FanFiction, which host thousands of spin-off stories of wildly varying length and genre written by fans of the Star Wars franchise, the Batman franchise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, grunge music, Hamilton, etc.
Online Resources
Childhood in America – the Summer/Fall issue of Quarto magazine, produced by the William L. Clemens Library of the University of Michigan: short, attractively illustrated articles on such topics as school photographs and children’s games
Remaking Growing Up: Nineteenth-Century America – fascinating article published in Histoire sociale – Social History by Harvey J. Graff: notable for drawing on numerous first-person accounts by nineteenth-century young Americans
‘Advice to Youth’ – text of Mark Twain’s witty, subversive guidelines to young people in America, dating from 1882
A Brief History of Teenagers – article by Derek Thompson in the Saturday Evening Post of 13 February, 2018: journalistic rather than academic in register, but engaging and features some interesting quotations about teens from the 1930s onwards
S.E. Hinton – website devoted to the work of Hinton, whose novel, The Outsiders (1967) is considered in the chapter: includes some valuable materials, e.g. photographs taken on set during Francis Ford Coppola’s movie adaptation (1983)
Douglas Coupland – website of this laureate of North America’s young precariat, including, among other materials, links to academic articles on Coupland (many of them open-access)
Teens & Youth – very helpful compilation by the Pew Research Center of reports on many dimensions of contemporary young Americans’ lives, from their religious observance and reading habits to their interactions with social media and videogames
The Civic Outlook of Young Adults in America – a survey conducted in 2023 by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars that helpfully complements the Pew Research Center’s data above by documenting the participation of members of Gen Z in civic activity
Youth Disconnection in America – a sombre last entry in this list, produced by Measure of America and detailing by gender, ethnicity, state, etc. the percentages of young people ‘between the ages of 16 and 24 who are not in school and not working’