Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies

Once again, Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe offer a volume that will set the agenda in the field of computers and composition scholarship for a decade. The technology changes that scholars of composition studies face as the next century opens couldn\u27t be more dramatic or deserving of passionate study. While we have always used technologies (e.g., the pencil) to communicate with each other, the electronic technologies we now use have changed the world in ways that we have yet to identify or appreciate fully. Likewise, the study of language and literate exchange, even our understanding of terms like literacy, text, and visual, has changed beyond recognition, challenging even our capacity to articulate them.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1118/thumbnail.jp

Locating Imagination in Popular Culture

Locating Imagination in Popular Culture offers a multi-disciplinary account of the ways in which popular culture, tourism and notions of place intertwine in an environment characterized by ongoing processes of globalization, digitization and an increasingly ubiquitous nature of multi-media. Centred around the concept of imagination, the authors demonstrate how popular culture and media are becoming increasingly important in the ways in which places and localities are imagined, and how they also subsequently stimulate a desire to visit the actual places in which people’s favourite stories are set. With examples drawn from around the globe, the book offers a unique study of the role of narratives conveyed through media in stimulating and reflecting desire in tourism. This book will have appeal in a wide variety of academic disciplines, ranging from media and cultural studies to fan- and tourism studies, cultural geography, literary studies and cultural sociology

Maturation, consumerism and young adult literature: the perpetual adolescent in fiction by M.T. Anderson and Scott Westerfeld

This thesis argues that the scholarly conception of young adult literature as an aid to maturation is problematised by a strong cultural association between consumerism and juvenilisation, and that such tensions are most evident in contemporary young adult books with an ‘anti-consumerism’ gloss. Scholarship centres on the idea that young adult literature functions primarily as an aid in the adolescent reader’s quest for maturity, underpinned by a conceptualisation of adolescence as a tumultuous period of identity formation requiring adult guidance. However, the young adult novel is also a profit-driven consumer product aimed at a particular marketing demographic, the teenager. The ways young adult literature ‘sells’ itself and an ideology of consumerism to the teenager have begun to receive critical attention in the past couple of decades. This period has also seen the emergence of young adult books in which the implied rhetorical purpose is to interrogate consumerism. Building on such scholarship, I draw on the ‘perpetual adolescent’ stereotype to analyse the tension between the ‘maturing adolescent’ and the ‘consuming teenager’ in case studies of ‘anti-consumerism’ books by contemporary authors M.T. Anderson and Scott Westerfeld, with reference to a number of other texts. Also emerging largely in the last few decades, the perpetual adolescence thesis posits an erosion of traditional ‘adulthood’ in post-World War II Western consumer society, expressing a strong cultural anxiety regarding the apparently juvenilising nature of consumerism. I argue that M.T. Anderson’s Feed (2002) and Burger Wuss (1999) characterise perpetual adolescence as the inability to make ‘adult’ rational decisions in a consumer society, and Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series (2005-2007) and So Yesterday (2004) portray perpetual adolescence as the freedom to defer ‘adult’ stability through continual stylistic redefinition. Though Anderson’s portrayal is more pessimistic and Westerfeld’s more celebratory, both authors ‘sell’ a consumer lifestyle associated with the teenager by, for example, conveying the idea that consuming in a non-conventional way is radical. These books make overt a tension between the ‘maturing adolescent’ and the ‘consuming teenager’ that has always underpinned young adult literature, and show that the ‘consuming teenager’ requires more attention for a fuller understanding of the genre

Bowdoin Orient v.133, no.1-24 (2003-2004)

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