This unit focuses on novels and films for young adults, an increasingly prominent market segment. Students will consider young adults as an implied audience and identify the ideological thrusts and socializing agendas in texts, identifying the ways in which novels and film texts of their choice map the processes of maturity to adulthood. Attention is paid to theories dealing with notions of adolescence as a cultural and historical construct, and to the ways in which discursive modes create subjectivities that have the potential to reinforce and remodel identity and power structures, both within texts and in contemporary culture.
