Dear About the Young Idea: Adolescence in Contemporary Literature and Culture students,
Mike Jones and I, your tutors for the course, are looking forward to meeting you next term.
Over the vacation you should try and get ahead with some of the reading. I’d recommend
getting a copy of Jon Savage’s interesting prehistory of the idea of the teenager, Teenage: The
Creation of Youth, 1875-1945. I will be putting the required reading from it on line on Sussex
Direct in early January but it’s worth reading the whole book if you can. We will be talking a bit
about G. Stanley Hall so look particularly at Chapter 5 “The American Century”. (I will put this
up on Study Direct as well.)
Please also read Willa Cather’s story “Paul’s Case” over vacation, and our first novel, Elizabeth
Bowen’s The Death of the Heart. This will get you thinking about the portrayal of adolescence in
the early 20th century.
This course’s title “About the Young Idea” comes from a song by the Jam called “In the City”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WunOoSquNNU. Another song by the Jam which is an
inspiration for my thinking about adolescence is this one, “When you’re young”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9sThEysmdY . Don’t panic, I’m not expecting you to
share my taste in music, but I would like you to come to class having thought about a poem,
scene from a novel, song, or TV or movie clip, that sums up something about adolescence for
you, and be prepared to talk about why you like it. Think about some of the following questions:
What defines adolescence for you? Is adolescence a product of a specific historical moment, or
are there things that are shared by all adolescents across time? Does adolescence differ according
to where you are from. or what your race, class, gender, or sexuality is?
This term, your dissertations will be due very shortly after the end of term which means it is very
important that you stay on top of the reading, and begin to think about your topic early on in the
course. If you think you might want to write on a topic from later in the term (Never Let Me Go,
or Ghost World, for instance) please read them early and come talk to Mike or I in our office
hours (TBA) about your plans.
Enjoy the vacation and Mike and I look forward to seeing you in January. Final course outline
follows.
Best,
Pam Thurschwell (and Mike Jones)
About the Young Idea: Adolescence in Contemporary Literature and Culture
Pam Thurschwell (lectures)/Mike Jones (seminars)
This course will explore the idea of the adolescent as central to early 20th through early 21st
century culture. We’ll look at the ways in which the adolescent morphs into the teenage
consumer (and consumed) in the 1950s in novels such as Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners and
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. We’ll consider the adolescent as a site of cultural fantasy and cultural
fears in relation to class, race, gender and sexuality. We’ll look at the adolescent’s positioning in
radical politics, subculture, utopia, nostalgia. We’ll wind up with several popular culture
representations of the teenager including Back to the Future and The Hunger Games, and ask what
Katniss might teach us about contemporary neo-liberal culture.
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You will have one lecture and one seminar a week. We encourage you to develop your own ideas
for your final long essay and will be happy to point you towards further readings.
1) Feb 1st: Theorizing adolescence: Jon Savage, Teenage; G. Stanley Hall from Adolescence (1904)
selected writings on adolescent psychology and juvenile delinquency; etc. and Willa Cather’s
“Paul’s Case”
(First week’s reading will be available on Study Direct. Savage, Teenage is a highly recommended
but not required text)
2) Feb 8th: Modern(ist) Girlhood: Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart (1938) and Bowen,
“Modern Girlhood” (1945) in People, Places and Things; “Teenagers” (1953) [Shorter works on
Study Direct]
3) Feb 15: Adolescence during wartime: Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding (1946) and
Graham Greene, “The Destructors” (1954) [Will show clip from Donnie Darko in relation to
“The Destructors” ]
Secondary reading: Elizabeth Freeman, The Wedding Complex [chapter on The Member of the
Wedding, on Study Direct]
4)Feb 22: Consuming Adolescence: Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955) and readings from Freud
(including 1905a. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Penguin Freud Library 7: 32-169. (On
puberty section)
5) Feb 29 Adolescent Consumers: Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners (1958)
[Recommended: Nel Dunn, Up the Junction (1963)]
6) March 6: 60s youth: Joyce Carol Oates, “Where are you going, Where have you been?” and
Philip Roth, American Pastoral (1997) (Read first half of Roth for seminar)
Recommended: (goes well with American Pastoral, Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document)
7) March 14: Adolescence and/as revolution: Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces (1989) (2nd half of
American Pastoral for seminar)
Easter Break
8) April 4: Postmodern Adolescence: Daniel Clowes, Ghost World (1997) (book and film)
9) April 11: Adolescent Dystopias?: Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go (2005)
10)April 18: Tiqqun, Theory of the Young-Girl, trans. Ariana Reines (Semiotext(e), 2012)
Harmony Korine (dir.), Spring Breakers (2012)
11) April 25: Adolescence in film from the 1980s to the present: featuring Back to the Future
(1985) (definitely) and (probably) The Fault in Our Stars (2014)/The Hunger Games (2012)
Seminars this week will be in class dissertation workshops
12) May 2nd: No class. Dissertation meetings one on one with Mike Jones and/or Pam
Thurschwell
Primary Reading List (you must own/have your own copy for class of the following
works):
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Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart (1938)
Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding (1946)
Graham Greene, “The Destructors” (1954) (short story)
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners (1958)
Philip Roth, American Pastoral (1997)
Daniel Clowes, Ghost World (1997) (Full text of Ghost World also available in The Daniel Clowes
Reader, ed. Ken Parille (2013)
Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go (2005)
Tiqqun, Theory of the Young-Girl, trans. Ariana Reines (Semiotext(e), 2012)
Required films:
Ghost World (2001)
Spring Breakers (2012)
These readings are required but will be available on Study Direct:
Hall, G. Stanley. Adolescence : its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime,
religion and education. 2 volumes. New York: D. Appleton, 1925. (I will take selections
from this work)
Cather, Willa. 1984. “Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament,” The Troll Garden. New York: New
American Library
Elizabeth Bowen, “Modern Girlhood” (1945) and Teenagers (1953) in People, Places and Things
(ed. Alan Hepburn) (Edinburgh UP, 2008) ISBN: 9780748635696
Marcus, Greil. 1989. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press.
Sigmund Freud Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) Penguin Freud Library 7: 32-169. (On
puberty section)
Highly recommended films:
Back to the Future (1985)
Donnie Darko (2001)
The Hunger Games (2012)
The Fault in Our Stars (2014)
Jon Savage, Teenage (writers, Jon Savage and Matt Wolf):
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2196055/
Recommended:
Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document (2006) [with American Pastoral]
Nel Dunn, Up the Junction (1963) [with Absolute Beginners]
Secondary Critical Readings
General and on specific readings for the course:
(Strongly recommended secondary readings are starred. This does not mean you have to own
copies of these books, but it will be very helpful to have read some of them in order to make
connections throughout the course.)
*Savage, Jon. Teenage: The Creation of Youth: 1875-1945. London: Pimlico, 2008.ISBN-10:
1845951468
*Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age!: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. New York and London:
Routledge Falmer, 2001.
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Hall, G. Stanley. 1925. Adolescence : its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex,
crime, religion and education. 2 volumes. New York: D. Appleton.
Marcus, Greil. 1989. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press.
Elizabeth Freeman, The Wedding Complex (Duke University Press, 2002) (Chapters on Lolita and
The Member of the Wedding)
Ohi, Kevin. Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James and Nabokov (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005)
Mao, Douglas. 2008. Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature 18601960 Princeton: Princeton University Press.
David Fowler, Youth Culture in Modern Britain 1920-1970. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Gilbert, Geoff. Before Modernism Was: Modern History and the Constituency of Writing Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. (chapter “Boys: Manufacturing Inefficiency”)
Kett, Joseph. Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present. New York: Basic Books,
1977.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan.
New York: Vintage Books.
--. 1990. The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New
York: Vintage Books.
DeLuzio, Crista. 2007. Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830-1930. Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Dyhouse, Carol. 2013. Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women. London: Zed
Books.
The Daniel Clowes Reader ed. Ken Parille (2013)
Mark Paterson, Consumption and Everyday Life (2006)
Roni Narov, The Poetics of Childhood (2003)
Jon Savage (interview on film Teenage):
http://www.theguardian.com/film/video/2014/jan/22/jon-savage-teenage-videointerview
Further Secondary Readings:
On the Bildungsroman and the coming of age story:
Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (1987)
*Esty Jed. 2012. Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)
Kenneth Millard, Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
Thurschwell, Pamela (2012) “Dead boys and adolescent girls: unjoining the bildungsroman in
Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding and Toni Morrison’s Sula.” English Studies in
Canada 38 (3-4). pp. 105-128.
Queer Theory and Queer Temporality
* Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Freeman, Elizabeth (ed.). 2007. Queer Temporalities: a special issue of GLQ 13:2-3. Duke
University Press.
Halberstam, Judith. 2006. “The Politics of Negativity in Recent Queer Theory” in Forum: “The
Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory.” PMLA 121.3 (2006) 823-24.
*Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child or Growing Sideways in the 20th Century
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Warner, Michael. 1990. “Homo-Narcissism; Or, Heterosexuality.” In Engendering Men, edited by
Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden. 190-206. New York: Routledge.
*Bruhm, Stephen and Natasha Hurley, eds. 2004. Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Nealon, Christopher. 2001. Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Psychoanalysis and Adolescence:
Freud, Sigmund
*--. 1909. “Family Romances” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, Volume IX (1906-1908): Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ and Other Works, 235-242
--. 1932. Foreword to August Aichhorn, Wayward Youth. New York: Putnam, (1925).
--. 1905. “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (‘Dora’)” In The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works, edited by James Strachey. Vol 7. 1-122. London: Hogarth,
1955.
--. 1920. “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman.” Penguin Freud Library
9: 367-400.
***--. 1905a. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Penguin Freud Library 7: 32-169. (especially On
puberty section)
-- and Joseph Breuer. 1895. Studies on Hysteria. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works, edited by James Strachey. Vol 2. London: Hogarth, 1955.
Freud, Anna. 1958. “Adolescence” In The Writings of Anna Freud, Vol V, Research at the
Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic and Other Papers 1956-65. New York: International
Universities Press, Inc. 138-165.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge.
Jacobus, Mary. 1995. “Russian Tactics: Freud’s ‘Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’” GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2:1-2 (April 1995): 65-79.
Riley, Denise. 1983. War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother. London: Virago.
Thurschwell, Pamela. 2009 (2nd edition) Sigmund Freud. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Critical
Thinkers.
--. 2012. “Freud’s Stepchild: Adolescent Subjectivity and Psychoanalysis.” In History and Psyche:
Culture, Psychoanalysis, and the Past, edited by Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor.
Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan.
Bernheimer, Charles and Claire Kahane, eds. 1985. In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism.
London: Virago.
Lesser, Ronnie C. and Thomas Domenici, eds. 1999. That Obscure Subject of Desire: Freud’s Female
Homosexual Revisited. New York: Routledge.
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