Angry Young Men Research Articles

Angry young men and women

Purpose Reviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies. Design/methodology/approach This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context. Findings Portrayals of superiors in film or on television are rarely positive. Think about it for a second. The cliche of the boss or supervisor is of an aggressive male, barking orders at employees, showing barely any humanity and never satisfied by anything his charges do for him. Alternatively, there is the stereotypically “hard-assed” woman boss who is similarly unyielding or sometimes the other end of the spectrum is used, and a boss is shown to be slightly deranged or so ineffectual as to be rendered irrelevant by their subordinates. Practical Implications Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations. Originality/value The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Louis Andriessen La Commedia, Barbican Hall, London

In what would become known as the Notenkrakersactie, a group of composers, Louis Andriessen amongst them, famously disrupted a Concertgebouw Orchestra concert in 1969, protesting its Establishment politics and unwillingness to engage with the younger generation of Dutch firebrands. Nearly half a century later, Andriessen is a recipient not only of commissions from said orchestra but also of what is arguably the most prestigious (and certainly the most lucrative) composition prize in the world, the Grawemeyer Award. There is no great irony here, of course – music history is littered with examples of iconoclasts whose originality disoriented contemporary opinion, not to mention angry young men whose radicalism mellowed with age – but the case of Andriessen is certainly striking.

Nationalism in Today’s Antarctic

Whilst nationalism is a recognised force globally, its framing is predicated on experience in conventionally occupied parts of the world. The familiar image of angry young men waving Kalashnikovs means that the idea that nationalism might be at play in Antarctica has to overcome much instinctive resistance, as well as the tactical opposition of the keepers of the present Antarctic political arrangements. The limited consideration of nationalism in Antarctica has generally been confined to the past, particularly “Heroic-Era” and 1930s–1940s expeditions. This article addresses the formations of nationalism in the Antarctic present. Antarctic nationalism need not present in the same shape as nationalisms elsewhere to justify being called nationalism. Here it occurs in a virtual or mediated form, remote from the conventional metropolitan territories of the states and interests concerned. The key aspect of Antarctic nationalism is its contemporary form and intensity. We argue that given the historic difficulties of Antarctic activities, and the geopolitical constraints of the Cold War, it has only been since the end of that Cold War that a more muscular nationalism has been able to flourish in Antarctica. Our assessment is that there at least 11 bases upon which Antarctic nationalism might arise: (i) formally declared claims to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica; (ii) relative proximity of Antarctica to one’s metropolitan territory; (iii) historic and institutional associations with Antarctica; (iv) social and cultural associations; (v) regional or global hegemonic inclinations; (vi) alleged need in relation to resources; (vii) contested uses or practices in Antarctica; (viii) carry-over from intense antipathies outside Antarctica; (ix) national pride in, and mobilisation through, national Antarctic programmes; (x) infrastructure and logistics arrangements; or (xi) denial or constraint of access by one’s strategic competitors or opponents. In practice of course, these are likely to be manifested in combination. The risks inherent in Antarctic nationalism are the risks inherent in unrestrained nationalism anywhere, compounded by its already weak juridical situation. In Antarctica, the intersection of nationalism with resources poses a particular challenge to the regional order and its commitments to shareable public goods such as scientific research and environmental protection.

“What are you like to come home to?” Domesticity in Postwar British Women’s Poetry and Fiction, 1945–1960

This essay presents readings of a wide range of British women's poetry and fiction of the immediate postwar period (1945-1960) that focus on the topic of domesticity. It explores the capacities of literary texts to intervene in a slow process of cultural change in gendered attitudes towards domestic life, homemaking and notions of women's place in the home. To illustrate the 'nadir of British feminism' (M. Pugh) as a structure of feeling, it also draws on advertisements and marital advice books from the 1950s. While poems by Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Jennings and Denise Levertov respond to the pressures of domesticity, novels by Elizabeth Taylor (At Mrs Lippincote's) and Josephine Leslie (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir) point towards what might be called 'alternative domesticities', however imaginary. The essay argues that the possibility of women's personal freedom (within or beyond domestic settings) in the age of the 'angry young men' had to be translated into the defamiliarising strains of the 'female Gothic' and could only be imagined in the form of comic supernatural romance or satirical verse.

A Rhetorical Reading of Smith's Book in THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE RUNNER

Grouped with Britain's “angry young men” generation of writers, Alan Sillitoe's fictions explore the resentment of the post–World War II working class toward the middle and upper classes. “The Lone...

Bernard Kops: Fantasist, London Jew, Apocalyptic Humorist by William Baker and Jeanette Roberts Shumaker (review)

Reviewed by: Bernard Kops: Fantasist, London Jew, Apocalyptic Humorist by William Baker and Jeanette Roberts Shumaker Laini Kavaloski (bio) William Baker and Jeanette Roberts Shumaker. Bernard Kops: Fantasist, London Jew, Apocalyptic Humorist. Plymouth, United Kingdom: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii + 149. $65.00. Bernard Kops: Fantasist, London Jew, Apocalyptic Humorist is a welcome addition to the small but growing number of critical works on twentieth-century Anglo-Jewish writers. Indeed, this is the first book-length study of the works of Bernard Kops, the understudied contemporary playwright, poet, and novelist. In this new volume, William Baker and Jeanette Roberts Shumaker make the case that Kops is important to the so-called new wave of British drama as well as to the [End Page 315] historical and social critique of Jewish life in twentieth-century London. So too, much of his work details the London Bohemian subculture of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s of which he was a part. As surely as this is a study of Kops the innovative contemporary writer, it is also a study of Kops the social critic, the activist, and the careful chronicler of London’s Jewish East End. Baker and Shumaker’s approach to Kops’s work explores not only his techniques but also “the subjects that inform his work” (xv). Kops’s texts are examined within chapters that are organized according to themes and issues of identity. For example the first three chapter titles (of seven total) are titled, “The Writer’s I,” “The Role and Function of Family,” and “Identity Formation, Self-Discovery, and Aging.” While these chapter titles are useful for exploring the central themes of Kops’s work, they make locating specific works difficult. Due to the inevitable complexity of themes in any given work, the discussion of a play or novel may be scattered throughout several chapters. For example, The Hamlet of Stepney Green is found in chapter 3, “Identity Formation, Self-Discovery, and Aging,” under the subheading “Breaking Bonds, Skinning Cats, Talking Animals.” It is also discussed in chapter 4, “Jewish Identity within British Culture.” While these titles make navigation of the text confusing, the authors do provide a useful set of subsections within each chapter: “Fiction,” “Non-Fiction,” “Plays,” “Radio Plays,” and “Poetry.” These subheadings remain consistent in each chapter, making browsing within the chapters more efficient. Bernard Kops is well known for his depictions and critiques of Jewish London, and the authors are careful to include discussions of the places and events that inspire Kops’s writing. Central to the setting and political contexts of many of Kops’s works are the marginalization of Jewish writers, the experiences of the war years in London, and the shifting populations of the East End community. For example, Kops reconstructs the world of the London Blitz in his radio play The Lost Love of Phoebe Meyers (2006). Though the play is set in Whitechapel in 1994, Baker and Shumaker suggest that flashbacks to the destruction of 1940s bombed-out London (created in part through the skillful use of sound and music) mirror the lost world of the once-vibrant Jewish community in the East End (xiv). The many historical connections made by the authors throughout the text sharpen their focus on Kops’s portrayal of his own identity, and on Jewish identity more generally. The authors claim rightly that “Kops’s plays, poems, and novels express this poignant quest for meaning,” particularly in a demoralized post-Holocaust world (xviii). Critical volumes such as this generally include at least one critical reassessment of an author’s work. Baker and Shumaker’s analysis of one of Kops’s most well known plays, The Hamlet of Stepney Green (1956), though an astute interpretation, may finally oversimplify the play. The authors approach this rich text by comparing the characters to those of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Baker and [End Page 316] Shumaker suggest that the Hamlet figure, David Levy, is a portrayal of “the era’s so-called angry young man” (35), a character caught in the languishing Jewish East End and burdened by the Jewish legacy of the Holocaust. David struggles with his father’s ambiguous accusation that David’s mother has...

Heroic workers and angry young men: Nostalgic stories of class in England

This article discusses nostalgic images of white working-class life through the twin figures of ‘the heroic worker’ and ‘the angry young man’. Using a case study of a discussion of Roy Williams’ play Vultures, I consider the ways in which nostalgic figures are used to position a contemporary white working class as lacking value. I argue that these nostalgic figures provide anchor points in decline narratives which, I argue, have come to define the ways in which the English white working class are represented. Hence, I argue that some forms of nostalgic class representations may be one means through which continued disparagement of contemporary white working-class people is rendered respectable.

Generation in Literary History: Three Constellations of Generationality, Genealogy, and Memory

“Generation” is a twofold term. Understood as generational identity (generationality) the history of “generation” can be traced back to its foundational moment during the First World War. In its second meaning, as genealogy, the idea of generation is age-old. While sociological and historical research tends to focus on generationality, literary and cultural studies have recently reinvigorated the study of generation as genealogy. Both concepts are deeply enmeshed with literature and other representational media. Such entanglements point well beyond our field’s traditional practice of using the notion of generation as a means of writing literary history (from the “first-generation Romantics” to the “angry young men”). What is at stake, rather, is the development of comprehensive and conceptually rigorous approaches to the many-layered interrelationships between generation, memory, and literature. “Generation” deserves to be put on the agenda of a “new” literary history. This article therefore proposes an integrative literary- and memory-studies perspective on generation, combining classic and more recent theories of generation with historical case studies. It reconstructs three discursive constellations around “generation” that have shaped the past century (the First World War and the “lost generation,” the Holocaust and the “generation of postmemory,” and the nexus between immigration and generation) with a focus on the question of how literature and literary studies have intervened in these discourses. It does so in order to show the rich, and still largely untapped, potential of studying generationality and genealogy as part of literary history.

The Cold War's cultural ecosystem: angry young men in British and Soviet cinema, 1953–1968

Using examples from postwar British and Soviet cinema, this article interprets European Cold War culture within the framework of a shared cultural ecosystem. The case study of reformist movements in 1950s and 1960s British and Soviet cinema makes clear that analogous sociopolitical and economic developments across postwar Europe inspired film heroes, narratives, and aesthetics that transcended national and ideological borders. The concept of a continent-wide cultural ecosystem elucidates how and why specific cultural phenomena—such as the figure of the “angry young man”—reflect an existence of a dynamic trans-systemic Cold War culture.

Emergency Medicine in the fourth decade: Angry young man or mid‐life crisis?

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Wise Young Fool by Sean Beaudoin (review)

Reviewed by: Wise Young Fool by Sean Beaudoin Karen Coats Beaudoin, Sean . Wise Young Fool. Little, 2013. 412p. ISBN 978-0-316-20379-1 $18.00 R Gr. 9-12. Ritchie Sudden is a straight-edge rocker in a world gone askew. A drunk driver has killed his sister, his dad has left, and his mother's girlfriend has moved in. Ritchie himself is serving a ninety-day sentence in a juvenile detention center, where his smart-aleck aloofness has made him the favorite entry in an illicit fighting ring. His counselor suggests that he keep a journal, in which his explanation of how he came to be in the detention center is withheld until the end, and in which he traces his romantic exploits (he's hopelessly in love with an unreachable girl, and he has sex with the wrong girl before he ends up with his crush, who disillusions his dreams). Just as the plot summary suggests, this hits all of the expected plot points of the Angry Young Man genre, hewing so close to the line Frank Portman traced in King Dork (BCCB 5/06) that the two are almost indistinguishable in tone and conceit (there's even a chapter devoted entirely to band names, as well as an appendix devoted to a snarky hipster critique of existing band names). Such imitation is unusual for Beaudoin, who has proven nothing if not starkly original in his previous works (You Killed Wesley Payne, BCCB 1/11, etc.), but he nonetheless plays language like Hendrix plays a guitar, so what might seem stale in conception makes up many thousand bonus points in linguistic style, inventiveness, and dexterity. Ritchie is ultimately likable in his grief, even when he is being a bad friend, a raging son, or a chauvinistic jerk, and the characters around him, especially his mom's girlfriend, add perspectives that Ritchie knows are important even if he can't quite accept them yet. Give this to fans of Tim Tharp, Chris Lynch, and, of course, Frank Portman. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

FromBoostertoBolero:

ABSTRACTThis article historicizes a network of authors that coalesced around a post-surrealist aesthetic before World War II. These anarchists were destined to be overshadowed by the war, by hostile predecessors who wrote them out of history, and by progenitors who assumed the mantle of the Beats or Angry Young Men. Yet they sustained their vision from the 1940s to the 60s, and challenged the statist politics of the high modernists and Auden Generation. Anarchism was in tune with the literary interests of the 1960s, though it proved difficult for potential allies to recognize a kindred spirit.

“Playing Fiona and being happy with Dick”: Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement and The Adventures of Catullus Kelly

This article considers two novels by Andrew Salkey, Escape to an Autumn Pavement and The Adventures of Catullus Kelly. Where recent critical attention endeavours to emphasize the significance of the former novel as an account of black homosexuality, the intention here is to take these novels together to explore wider concerns of sex and sexuality during the 1960s. In so doing, these novels are located not just within the growing genre of West Indian writing with its emphasis upon the aesthetics of identity in this period, but also in its relation to literature associated with the “Angry Young Men”. The intention is to read Salkey’s work not just as expressions of migrant identity, but as illustrations of British identity during a moment of intense social change with regard to global status, sexual politics and incipient multiculturalism.

Mythology, Masculinity and Indian Cinema: Representation of ‘Angry Young Man’ in Popular Hindi Films of 1970s

In the 1970s popular Hindi cinema witnessed an emergence of action oriented films with a distinctive young protagonist. Tracing the antecedents of Indian masculine subjectivity in colonial discourse, this essay seeks to constitute a framework that identifies vestiges of mythological narratives alongside the politico-historical factors, to explain the formation of the belligerent male in the post-independence popular Hindi films. Reconciling the problematic of overdetermined Indianness- conceived as spiritual, calm, and other-worldly, together with its opposite: aggression, anger and this-worldly, that is also constitutive of Indian masculinity- the essay argues, benevolence or militancy cohere in the masculine self and, are activated according to specific political conditions in history. The angry man figure inscribed in the 1970s popular Hindi cinema is explicable in relation to the 1960s political crises in India that exposed a delegitimized Indian state. This essay focuses on the mythic tale of Parashurâma in the epic Purânas, which is instructive in understanding the rage and rebellion of the figure of the angry man- and his violent yet eventually sacrosanct masculinity- whose dharma (sacred duty) is to reinstate the flawed ideal even if that meant confronting the enemy within or going against one's own family.

“In a Land that I Love”: Working-Class Identity and the End of Empire in Ray Davies' Arthur or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire

In Britain, the rise of rock music coincided with the fall of empire, but the two are rarely connected. This paper considers a distinctive exception, the Kinks' album Arthur or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire (1969), in which Ray Davies develops a unique hybrid of rock music and social commentary, drawing the aesthetic of the “Angry Young Man” into the rock revolution, to offer a series of connected songs exploring the working-class experience of imperial decline. I argue that Davies creates an interplay of many voices and musical styles to challenge a monologic establishment with perspectives on empire that are multiple and double-edged.

Mythology, Masculinity and Indian Cinema: Representation of ‘Angry Young Man’ in Popular Hindi Films of 1970s

Mythology, Masculinity and Indian Cinema: Representation of ‘Angry Young Man’ in Popular Hindi Films of 1970s

Swedish angry young men

« On parle beaucoup des jeunes gens furieux, de la colere de la jeunesse d'aujourd'hui. On en parle volontiers parce que, des emeutes sans raison des adolescents suedois aux proclamations elaborees (...)

Pictures, Emotions, Conceptual Change

The article advocates the importance of studying conceptual meaning and change in modern mass media and highlights the significance of conceptual intermediality. The article first analyzes anger in Hindi cinema as an audiovisual key concept within the framework of an Indian national ideology. It explores how anger and the Indian angry young man became popularized, politicized, and stereotyped by popular films and print media in India in the 1970s and 1980s. The article goes on to advocate for extending conceptual history beyond language on theoretical grounds and identifies two major obstacles in political iconography: the methodological subordination of visuals to language in the negotiation of meaning, and the distinction of emotion and reason by assigning them functionally to different sign systems.

A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction Myrna Goldenberg, Professor Emerita A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, by Ruth Franklin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 256 pp. $29.95. In A Thousand Darknesses, Ruth Franklin challenges the nearly axiomatic principle proffered by Elie Wiesel and Theodor Adorno that neither fiction nor poetry can—or even should—represent the Holocaust accurately. Using terms like "documentary fiction," "documentary novel," "autobiographical fiction," and "novelistic work," Franklin justifies the de-sanctification of the survivor memoir. She sets out to prove that well-written novels and literary memoirs do treat the unimaginable both truthfully and informatively. She is courageous in her refusal to bow to "ownership" of the Holocaust as claimed by Elie Wiesel and some of his cohort of survivors and is downright contemptuous [End Page 153] of the Second Generation's co-optation of ownership, that is, "they identify so strongly with the sufferings of their parents as to assert themselves as witnesses to the Holocaust." She pulls no punches in her attacks on "the most pernicious aspect of the second generation phenomenon: the virtual displacement of the survivors by their own descendants through the appropriation of Holocaust narratives." For Franklin, Melvin Jules Bukiet is its most egregious culprit. A granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, she views her own generation of writers for whom the Holocaust is both central and backdrop as a literary critic, expecting neither fidelity nor indifference to the facts. Citing Nathan Englander's as the "most brilliant treatment of the Holocaust in contemporary American fiction," she goes on to find literary merit in novels and short stories of Jonathan Safran Foer and Michael Chabon. The meat of her book, though, is her analyses of the major work of six survivors—Tadeusz Borowski, Primo Levi, Elie Weisel, Piotr Rawicz, Jerzy Kosinski, Imre Kertesz—and four writers who used survivor memoirs as the bases of their works—Thomas Keneally/Steven Spielberg, Wolfgang Koeppen, W. G. Sebald, and Bernhard Schlink. Labeling Borowski as an "angry young man," Franklin applauds his "utterly unforgiving way in which [his stories] portray the behavior of the prisoners toward each other," thereby exploding myths of heroism and martyrdom and simultaneously ruining his career. Examining whether Borowski is actually the narrator of This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Franklin praises both his lack of sentimentality and his detached voice. In the face of his recently published letters from Auschwitz recently published as well as interviews of his fellow prisoners, it is hard to merge these several characterizations with the book's narrator. Is the book a memoir? Or an imaginative treatment of Borowski's observations? Is its narrator a moral voice? Is Borowski's voice a moral statement? Her chapters on other survivor writers are no less gripping. Primo Levi's books were "autobiographical, but they were not autobiography," asserts Franklin. Extracting material from Levi's works and life, Franklin finds that Levi's writing reveals his interest in subjects other than the Holocaust, although certainly his experiences in Auschwitz color all his work. She refuses to accept his death as a suicide, pointing out that vertigo was a serious side effect of his medications. In fact, we might consider "that Auschwitz kept Levi alive for forty years as a writer. . . ." This trenchant chapter on Levi is followed by an equally insightful one on Wiesel in which Franklin points to Wiesel's balance "between fidelity to the events it portrays and the making of literature." Sparing no praise for Night, she explores Wiesel's denial of his memoir as a narrative of his loss of faith, tracking the minor fracas of this denial even through the various translations of this influential memoir. There are no weak chapters [End Page 154] in A Thousand Darknesses, but among those that stand out is her extended analysis of Schindler's Ark/Schindler's List. Franklin tracks the history of the book and the film, explaining how the changes that Keneally and Spielberg made were appropriate for their respective media; in doing so, she keeps her readers aware of both the power and cost of the application of imagination to historical fact. In...

‘Aadat Se Majboor’/‘Helpless by Habit’: Metrosexual masculinity in contemporary Bollywood

This article considers the growth of neo-liberal culture in India through the advent of metrosexuality in contemporary, Bombay-based popular Hindi cinema, aka Bollywood. If, by the end of the twentieth century, the iconic ‘angry young man’ of 1970s popular Hindi cinema had been replaced by the ‘creative young man’, the first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed the emergence of the metrosexual male protagonist – one largely defined by his physical fitness, grooming and cosmopolitanism. This article explores the ways in which such a masculinity is ‘packaged’ in several recent films. In particular, these films appear to signal to their audience a certain postmodern savviness about the artifice of such masculinity, as well as its commercial underpinnings in marketing global consumer culture. Such metrosexualization, this article concludes, has now gone one step further with the emergence of the con man protagonist, reworking earlier models of urban Indian masculinity towards an increasingly neo-liberal aestheticization and promotion of individual enterprise, sexual and ethical decadence, and sculpted physiques.