Television And Youth Culture

The final book in jan jagodzinski's trilogy explores youth in postmodern society through a Lacanian lens. Jagodzinski explores the generalized paranoia that pervades the landscape of television and its effects on the younger generation. Instead of dismissing paranoia as a negative development, he claims that youth today labor within the context of paranoia to find their identities.

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.