Author: Timothy Shary File Type: pdf When teenagers began hanging out at the mall in the early 1980s, the movies followed. Multiplex theaters offered teens a wide array of perspectives on the coming-of-age experience, as well as an escape into the alternative worlds of science fiction and horror. Youth films remained a popular and profitable genre through the 1990s, offering teens a place to reflect on their evolving identities from adolescence to adulthood while simultaneously shaping and maintaining those identities. Drawing examples from hundreds of popular and lesser-known youth-themed films, Timothy Shary here offers a comprehensive examination of the representation of teenagers in American cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. He focuses on five subgenres- school, delinquency, horror, science, and romancesexuality - to explore how they represent teens and their concerns, how these representations change over time, and how youth movies both mirror and shape societal expectations and fears about teen identities and roles. He concludes that while some teen films continue to exploit various notions of youth sexuality and violence, most teen films of the past generation have shown an increasing diversity of adolescent experiences and have been sympathetic to the particular challenges that teens face.From Publishers WeeklyIn this comprehensive academic work, film scholar Shary analyzes hundreds of youth films made between 1980 and 2001 to detail how young people are represented within a codified system... [of]... certain subgenres and character types. He is particularly insightful in his breakdown of film genres (e.g., school-based, delinquent youth-centered, horror, science, sex) and on subgenre trends, such as changes in youth sex films since the prevalence of AIDS and more open attitudes toward teenage homosexuality. Appropriately, Shary criticizes some film reviewers for their condescending attitude toward teen films. But his constant reminders of how hard it is for him to remain objective doing research that will always be imbued with the problematics of her or his personal ideological positions are tiresome, as most readers accept this condition as the cost of reading another persons writing seeking complete objectivity in a humanistic study seems misplaced. Still, Sharys conclusions raise thought-provoking questions, among them what is the elitist cinema? and who are the we who tell youth who they are? The in-depth analysis and embrace of all types of teen movies, from Porkys (1981) to Save the Last Dance (2001), make this is a useful book, albeit one directed toward Sharys fellow academics. 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalShary (screen studies, Clark Univ.) takes an engaging and thorough look at American teen movies of the last 20 years. Instead of discussing celluloid and popular culture as corrupting influences on youth or providing a guide to them, Shary treats them as reflections of adolescent culture. But this is a book about films (e.g., John Hughess The Breakfast Club and Todd Solondzs Welcome to the Dollhouse), not the psychology of teenagers. He posits that the emergence of the multiplex cinemas in shopping malls led to a diversification of the teenyouth film, with a number of distinctive subgenres developing in response to the newly identifiable audience in the malls. He names five major subgenres-Youth in School, Delinquent Youth, The Youth Horror Film, Youth and Science, and Youth in Love and Having Sex-and devotes a chapter to each, referring to more than 900 films released between 1980 and 2001 to illustrate his points. Any film buff who grew up in the 1980s or 1990s will find this book fascinating, filled as it is with films weve either forgotten or are ashamed to discuss in our cinema studies classes. The book is aimed at an adult audience, though the language and diction are clear and not too weighted with jargon. YA librarians in particular may find the filmography and appended lists of bestworst films useful and the film analysis enlightening. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries.Andrea Slonosky, Long Island Univ. Lib., Brooklyn, NY 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Author: Marc Redfield File Type: pdf This book examines the affinity between theory and deconstruction that developed in the American academy in the 1970s by way of the Yale Critics Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, sometimes joined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. With this semi-fictional collective, theory became a media event, first in the academy and then in the wider print media, in and through its phantasmatic link with deconstruction and with Yale. The important role played by aesthetic humanism in American pedagogical discourse provides a context for understanding theory as an aesthetic scandal, and an examination of the ways in which de Mans work challenges aesthetic pieties helps us understand why, by the 1980s, he above all had come to personify theory. Combining a broad account of the Yale Critics phenomenon with a series of careful re-examinations of the event of theory, Redfield traces the threat posed by languages unreliability and inhumanity in chapters on lyric, on Hartmans representation of the Wordsworthian imagination, on Blooms early theory of influence in the 1970s together with his later media reinvention as the genius of the Western Canon, and on John Guillorys influential attempt to interpret de Manian theory as a symptom of literatures increasing marginality. A final chapter examines Mark Tanseys paintings Derrida Queries de Man and Constructing the Grand Canyon, works that offer subtle, complex reflections on the peculiar event of theory as-deconstruction in America. ** This book examines the affinity between theory and deconstruction that developed in the American academy in the 1970s by way of the Yale Critics Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, sometimes joined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. With this semi-fictional collective, theory became a media event, first in the academy and then in the wider print media, in and through its phantasmatic link with deconstruction and with Yale. The important role played by aesthetic humanism in American pedagogical discourse provides a context for understanding theory as an aesthetic scandal, and an examination of the ways in which de Mans work challenges aesthetic pieties helps us understand why, by the 1980s, he above all had come to personify theory. Combining a broad account of the Yale Critics phenomenon with a series of careful re-examinations of the event of theory, Redfield traces the threat posed by languages unreliability and inhumanity in chapters on lyric, on Hartmans representation of the Wordsworthian imagination, on Blooms early theory of influence in the 1970s together with his later media reinvention as the genius of the Western Canon, and on John Guillorys influential attempt to interpret de Manian theory as a symptom of literatures increasing marginality. A final chapter examines Mark Tanseys paintings Derrida Queries de Man and Constructing the Grand Canyon, works that offer subtle, complex reflections on the peculiar event of theory as-deconstruction in America. **