Jagodzinski, Jan. Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media

Adolescence, Winter, 2007

JAGODZINSKI, Jan. Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 294pp. $85.00 (h), $29.95 (p).

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 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 to rethink the boundaries of reality and fantasy, youth and innocence, family and society.