Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media [Paperback]

"Youth Fantasies offers a new approach to the analysis of youth culture. Rather than inquiring into the effects of certain cultural activities of youth (such as whether playing violent video games makes kids more aggressive), jagodzinski examines such activities in order to ask, 'What do youth want?' That is, what basic, largely unconscious psychic needs or desires are youth trying to fulfill through their seemingly ubiquitous and endless engagements with various forms of media? jagodzinski 's rigorous Lacanian psychoanalytic exploration and theorizing of this question provides rich insights for educators and counsellors that no one concerned with youth or interested in Lacanian theory or postmodernity can afford to do without."--Mark Bracher, Professor and Director Center for Literature and Psychoanalysis, Kent State University

"Stylish and succinct, sophisticated yet accessible, this stunning statement renders our (youth) fantasies simultaneously recognizable and intelligible."--William F. Pinar, St. Bernard Parish Alumni Endowed Professor, Louisiana State University

In Youth Fantasies, jan jagodzinski explores the meaning of "youth" in postmodern industrialized countries. His approach is decidedly psychoanalytic, drawing inspiration from a Lacanian paradigm as developed by the spirited writing of Slavoj Zizek. Youth Fantasies maintains that the symptoms of today's postmodern "youth" expose the "truth" of the Romantic modernist fantasy of the "innocent" or "divine" child that continues to residually structure beliefs concerning the institution of education and the nuclear family. jagodzinski develops this argument through three sections that deal with the problematic relationship between fantasy and reality, post-Oedipalization, and the cyber-subject. Incorporating a post-Lacanian psychoanalysis, jagodzinski asks us all to rethink the boundaries of reality and fantasy, youth and innocence, family and society.

jan jagodzinski is Professor in the Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta. He held a joint appointment with Mount Saint Vincent University in Nova Scotia and The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Currently, he teaches visual art education and media education as well as curricular issues as they relate to postmodern concerns of gender politics, cultural studies, and the media-specifically film and television. He is involved with the Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society as well as the Journal of Lacanian Studies. He edits the Journal of Social Theory in Art Education and is the author of The Anamorphic I/i, Postmodern Dilemmas: Outrageous Essays in Art & Art Education, Pun(k) Deconstruction: Experifigural Writings in Art & Art Education, Pedagogical Desire (editor), and Deconstructing the Oral Eye. jan jagodzinski was awarded the Manuel Barkan Memorial Award in 2011.