What is a girl?  What is a boy?  What do the figures of the child and the adolescent represent in Western literature and popular culture and what work do these figures do?  How and why did the figure of the girl come to capture the cultural imagination of the West in the last century?  How was boyhood to prefigure this imagining and how has boyhood been constructed? 

 
This course will foreground these and similar questions as we examine the literary and cultural histories of youth.  We will trace constructions of boyhood and girlhood in Western literature and popular culture from the turn of the 20th century to the present, including texts created about, for, and by girls, boys, and teens, as well as examine the discursive history of youth in relation to other configurations of age and gender, including manhood and womanhood.  This seminar will also expose students to the primary theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches developed by Youth Studies scholars to analyze media texts and youth cultures, focusing primarily on research in literary criticism, gender studies, and cultural studies.  We will also interrogate (be)coming of age and the relationship between boyhood/girlhood and “real” boys/girls.  A primary focus of the course will be analysis of the cultural work that girls and girlhood and boys and boyhood have performed toward the formation of ideas about gender, nation, race, class, sexuality, consumption, and American identity.

 

For This course, I:

• ​researched topic, pedagogy, and praxis;
• chose course texts, composed curriculum, syllabus, and assignments;
• designed online class Blackboard site and activities;
• will instruct the course summer 2012

 

Syllabus​