Mastering Adolescence in the Age of Cultural Studies
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Ginette Verstraete
Abstract
Discussing his methodology in the introductory chapter of The Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Adolescence (1992), John Neubauer writes: “In contrast to this method [of New Historicism reading a whole age through certain paradigmatic texts, G.V.] I start with the study of literary structures and narrative modes, not as an exercise in formalist criticism but rather because I believe that they encode social and historical issues […] Distrusting the notion that single texts can reveal central attitudes of an entire age, I try to achieve reasonable comprehensiveness by discussing a large number of literary and nonliterary, canonized and noncanonized texts. I end up with a large but inhomogeneous corpus that, spanning a variety of ideologies, discourses, and national cultures, is interlinked primarily by the common theme [of adolescence, G.V.]” (1992: 10–11). Neubauer recognizes that reading late-19th-century history through the prism of adolescence inevitably yields an imaginary reduction of the age (in its double sense), whereby a whole historical period threatens to be condensed to a theoretical phase in the Bildungsnarrative of “the” individual, while the personal complexities of adolescence are flattened out as the dominant episteme of that time. In order to avoid this double epistemological pitfall of reading (personal) history as theory or theory as history, Neubauer focuses on the historical workings of the third term, literature, and more precisely on the heterogeneous intertextual web connecting “a large number of literary and nonliterary, canonized and noncanonized texts” and paintings from various periods and “national cultures.” Joyce, Mann, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kipling, Gide, Kirchner, Munch, Freud, the sociologist G.S. Hall, Mead, and a host of other famous and lesser known writers, artists, and scientists … All of them are read under the sign or image of adolescence, which by the end of the book has become as particular as universal, as richly diverse as the singular subject of modern literature.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Portrait of an Interdisciplinary Life. John Neubauer zum 70. Geburtstag
- Introduction
- Thought-Images: A Brief History of Time
- The Return of the Dinosaurs: About Scientific Imagination and its Affects
- Borders and Monuments: Goethe's Reconstruction of the World as Knowledge
- History, Theory and Abraham Gottlob Werner
- Mynheer Peeperkorn's Fever
- Introduction
- History, Empire, Opera
- Music Albums: A Tiny Gesamtkunstwerk?
- Listening to Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate. A Dadaistic-Romantic transposition d'arts?
- Introduction
- Reading Melling's Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople. Topography and Control
- Penumbra
- Bruno Freddi's Vissuto
- From Stony Facts to Paper Flowers
- Picturing It. The Issue of Visuality in the Classical Theory of Metaphor
- Introduction
- The Practical Use of Historiography: from Haffner to Herodotus
- The Gap between Hannah Arendt and Franz Kafka
- Literature and Art in History
- Cultural Memory, Cultural History and Cultural Canons in the Third Millennium
- Cross-border Histories
- Introduction
- The Intolerable
- History, Theory and the Middle Voice
- Sacred Memory or Relics: Should Holocaust Documents Be Altered?
- Blasting the Historical Continuum: Stories of my Grandmother
- Der Erlkönig in Sarajevo: Did the monument forecast the catastrophe?
- Introduction
- Hans Mayer – Ansichten eines komparatistischen Außenseiters
- Mastering Adolescence in the Age of Cultural Studies
- Bamboozled by Literature
- Arguments for a Cross-Cultural Literary History. Theoretical and Practical Implications
- Comparative Literary History, Theory and Practice: John Neubauer's Contribution
- “Rich Seeds We Must Sow … But If Only a Few Will Take”
- John Neubauer's Cultural Geographies
- The Marathon Man
- Embracing the Horizon
- Rezensionen
Articles in the same Issue
- Portrait of an Interdisciplinary Life. John Neubauer zum 70. Geburtstag
- Introduction
- Thought-Images: A Brief History of Time
- The Return of the Dinosaurs: About Scientific Imagination and its Affects
- Borders and Monuments: Goethe's Reconstruction of the World as Knowledge
- History, Theory and Abraham Gottlob Werner
- Mynheer Peeperkorn's Fever
- Introduction
- History, Empire, Opera
- Music Albums: A Tiny Gesamtkunstwerk?
- Listening to Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate. A Dadaistic-Romantic transposition d'arts?
- Introduction
- Reading Melling's Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople. Topography and Control
- Penumbra
- Bruno Freddi's Vissuto
- From Stony Facts to Paper Flowers
- Picturing It. The Issue of Visuality in the Classical Theory of Metaphor
- Introduction
- The Practical Use of Historiography: from Haffner to Herodotus
- The Gap between Hannah Arendt and Franz Kafka
- Literature and Art in History
- Cultural Memory, Cultural History and Cultural Canons in the Third Millennium
- Cross-border Histories
- Introduction
- The Intolerable
- History, Theory and the Middle Voice
- Sacred Memory or Relics: Should Holocaust Documents Be Altered?
- Blasting the Historical Continuum: Stories of my Grandmother
- Der Erlkönig in Sarajevo: Did the monument forecast the catastrophe?
- Introduction
- Hans Mayer – Ansichten eines komparatistischen Außenseiters
- Mastering Adolescence in the Age of Cultural Studies
- Bamboozled by Literature
- Arguments for a Cross-Cultural Literary History. Theoretical and Practical Implications
- Comparative Literary History, Theory and Practice: John Neubauer's Contribution
- “Rich Seeds We Must Sow … But If Only a Few Will Take”
- John Neubauer's Cultural Geographies
- The Marathon Man
- Embracing the Horizon
- Rezensionen
