Jeunesse - Young People, Texts, Cultures (E-Journal)
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Do Something! Disciplinary Spaces and the Ideological Work of Play in James De Mille’s The “B. O. W. C.” and Richard Scrimger’s Into the Ravine
No full textThis analysis of a recent example of a Canadian adventure novel, Richard Scrimger’s Into the Ravine, is informed by a comparison to a nineteenth-century adventure novel, James De Mille’s The “B. O. W. C.”: A Book for Boys. I examine the development of the relationship between wilderness and domestic spaces and the ideological imperatives of the genre. As the locus of adventure moves from “real” wilderness spaces to the domesticated spaces of ravine and suburb, I suggest that play replaces survival as the ideological subtexts of young adult fiction. For the boys of contemporary Canadian adventure novels, the ravine becomes a complex moral geography shaped by the reactionary panic of modern adults.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2013.000
“A Copy of a Copy of a Copy”: Productive Repetition in Fight Club
No full textThere are two types of repetition: one that repeats based on identities and one that repeats differences. While the former is the common-sense view that understands difference to be the difference between two substantial things, the latter argues that, against this common-sense interpretation of repetition, it is difference itself that repeats and that, in fact, it is a failure to repeat identically that defines this latter version. Through an analysis of Deleuze’s conception of repetition as a repetition of difference in itself, this paper interprets Fight Club as a vehicle for addressing the question of how it is possible for something new to arise out of a seemingly stifling world of repetition and concretized identities. Given Deleuze’s ontology of immanence, fictional characters are no less real than flesh-and-blood people and, therefore, it is argued that alternative readings are actually offered up by the text itself, and not imposed by the reader from a transcendent point of view. In other words, literary texts are opened up to their own immanent becoming, a becoming that eventuates not only in the altering of the terms of the text, but, given the plane of immanence, in the reader as well.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2013.000
(Global) Capitalism and Immigrant Workers in Gary Paulsen's Lawn Boy: Naturalization of Exploitation
Get PDFExploitable migrant labour is one of the key organizational features of contemporary capital accumulation. Migrants' underpaid work makes a significant contribution to the affluence of Western receiving societies, keeping them economically prosperous. The article addresses the mechanisms of representation by means of which mainstream children's literature mystifies exploitative socio-economic relations affecting immigrant workers, which in turn leads to the naturalization of structural inequalities and hierarchically organized constructs of identity. Specifically, the article examines the ways in which exploitative labour practices in relation to migrant workers are effectively papered over and justified in Gary Paulsen's novel Lawn Boy.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2012.001
Childhood Undone: Four Contemporary Art Projects with Children
No full textChildren’s contemporary culture is a phenomenon of interest to many scholars. While most research focuses on digital media and Web 2.0, fewer studies have examined young people’s engagement with contemporary art as artists and creators. This paper introduces current research on art projects realized through collaborations between children and professional artists. It analyzes five international projects from Denmark, Canada, and the UK in order to make four points about how childhood is currently constituted in post-industrial democratic societies. On the one hand, artistic collaboration illuminates the boundary between childhood and adulthood, but on the other hand, it provides a practical and theoretical mechanism to reconceptualize children’s culture as dynamic, intercultural, and intergenerational.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2012.001
From Toddlers to Teens: The Colonization of Childhood the Disney Way
Get PDFDOI: 10.1353/jeu.2012.000