Synopses & Reviews
This book theorizes five youth television series: Dawsons Creek, Freaks and Geeks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Roswell, and Smallville from a psychoanalytic perspective drawing on the meeting ground between Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. jagodzinski develops the notion of self-refleXivity (as distinct from self-reflection and self reflexion) to identify that aspect of the inhuman within ourselves, namely the order of the drives that these series explore. It is argued that the narratology of the post-Gothic form of Buffy, Roswell, and Smallville is the structure of paranoid schizophrenia. A hyper-self-reflexivity informs Dawsons Creek, while Freaks and Greeks deals with ethical dilemmas.
Review
“Playful, challenging, and frequently surprising,
Television and Youth Culture is a veritable
tour-de-force. It is a powerful example of how to practice engaged scholarship that is equally at home with the complexities of philosophical ideas as it is with the practices of everyday media culture.”Joanna Zylinska, Reader in New Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London
“The third of a trilogy on media and youth culture, Television and Youth Culture extends the application of Lacan and Deleuze in conceptualizing youth as a postmodern signifier rather than a developmental age. jagodzinski brings a powerful psychoanalytic framework to bear on seemingly banal youth television series. Youll never watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the same way again.”-- James A. Anderson, Professor and Director of the Center for Communication and Community, Department of Communication, University of Utah
Review
"This book offers an intellectual explication of each of thsee particular shows through a lens of individual self-perception as well as cultural identity that speaks to not just psychoanalysis, but sociology, education, and even media studies. In doing so, Jagodzinski provides, in a density that echoes Lacan's style, a sharp explanation of post-Freudian thinking."-- P.L. Yoder, Choice
Synopsis
This book explores youth in postmodern society through a Lacanian lens. Jagodzinski explores the generalized paranoia that pervades the landscape of television. Instead of dismissing paranoia as a negative development, he claims that youth today labour within the context of paranoia to find their identities.
About the Author
jan jagodzinski is a Professor in the Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where he teaches visual art and media education and curricular issues as they relate to postmodern concerns of gender politics, cultural studies, and media. He is an editorial board member for Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (PCS); an associate editor for Journal of Lacanian Studies (JLS); on the review board for Studies in Art Education (SAE), Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (JCT), Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education (JCRAE), Visual Culture & Gender; and co-series editor with Mark Bracher for Palgraves series Education, Psychoanalysis, Social Transformation. He is the author of The Anamorphic I/i (1996); Pun(k) Deconstruction (1997); Postmodern Dilemmas (1997); editor of Pedagogical Desire (2002); Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media (Palgrave, 2004); and Music in Youth Culture: A Lacanian Approach (Palgrave, 2005). jan jagodzinski was awarded the Manuel Barkan Memorial Award in 2011.
Table of Contents
Youth Living in Paranoic Times * PART I: TELEVISED PARANOIAC SPACES * The "Real" of Reality Television * The Paranoiac Space of
The X-Files * The "X" in the Self-refleXive Narrative:
The X-Files * PART II: THE REAL PARANOIA * The Death Drive's at Stake:
Buffy: The Vampire Slayer * The Buffyverse Soteriology: Youth's
Garden of Earthly Delights * PART III: SELF-REFELEXIVE NARCISSISM AND ALIENATION *
Dawson's Creek: Vacating Trauma Through Nostalgia *
Roswell High: The Limits of the In/Human *
Smallville: Youth as Alien Other * The Ecographies of Television: Youth Undercover