Television and Youth Culture

This book theorizes five youth television series: Dawson’s Creek, Freaks and Geeks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Roswell, and Smallville from a psychoanalytic perspective drawing on the meeting ground between Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. jagodzinski develops the notion of self-refleXivity (as distinct from self-reflection and self reflexion) to identify that aspect of the inhuman within ourselves, namely the order of the drives that these series explore. It is argued that the narratology of the post-Gothic form of Buffy, Roswell, and Smallville is the structure of paranoid schizophrenia. A hyper-self-reflexivity informs Dawson’s Creek, while Freaks and Greeks deals with ethical dilemmas.

jan jagodzinski is a Professor in the Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where he teaches visual art and media education and curricular issues as they relate to postmodern concerns of gender politics, cultural studies, and media.  He is an editorial board member for Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (PCS); an associate editor for Journal of Lacanian Studies (JLS); on the review board for Studies in Art Education (SAE), Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (JCT), Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education (JCRAE), Visual Culture & Gender; and co-series editor with Mark Bracher for Palgrave’s series Education, Psychoanalysis, Social Transformation. He is the author of The Anamorphic I/i (1996); Pun(k) Deconstruction (1997); Postmodern Dilemmas (1997); editor of Pedagogical Desire (2002); Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media (Palgrave, 2004); and Music in Youth Culture: A Lacanian Approach (Palgrave, 2005). jan jagodzinski was awarded the Manuel Barkan Memorial Award in 2011.

— P.L. Yoder, Choice