Mastering Adolescence in the Age of Cultural Studies

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.