The Fin-de-siècle Culture of Adolescence (review)

REVIEWS even phüosophers, lagging behind their colleagues in other discipUnes, have become historicaUy minded as the star ofanalytic aesthetics wanes. More disturbing are Woodmansee's omissions and the selectiveness of her sociological explanations. She is of course free to emphasize the paradigm of autonomy over that of expression (or creativity), and disinterestedness over what Peter Bürger caUs the "institution" of Art (rather than the arts). But can she simply ignore historians' discussion ofthe "bourgeois pubUc sphere"—not merely the Habermasian Une, but equaUy Roger Chartier's work on pre-revolutionary book culture? One would never guess at the considerable overlap with Raymond WiUiams's early work on culture and "Uteracy" as complex responses to the division oflabor. Bourdieu's work, for example, on the "Uterary field," or Viala on the emergence of the writer, are missing even from the bibUography. Yet Woodmansee is a polemicist after all, and these essays should do their bit in shaking up estabUshed views. Martin Donougho University ofSouth Carolina JOHN NEUBAUER. The Fin-de-siècle Culture ofAdolescence. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992. xv + 288 pp. John Neubauer has done for the phenomenon of adolescence what Carl Schorske did for the city ofVienna (in Fin-de-siècle Vienna; Politics and Culture) by exploring its parameters through Uterary texts and locating it within a larger psycho-socio-poUtical framework. Whereas Schorske separated Uterature from other cultural artifacts and social institutions, Neubauer emphasizes, particularly in his concluding chapter "Adolescence: The Fiction ofReaUty," the symbiotic relationship ofUterature and society. These particular, fin-de-siècle Uterary texts, in Neubauer's view, move beyond mere reflection of social institutions to, in fact, help shape them: "modern adolescence was the product not just of slow and bUnd changes in famüy structure, schooling, and medical care but also ofperception and discourse that were in turn patterned to no smaU degree by fiction" (82). Neubauer structures bis book around, first, a chaUenge to two commonly-held views of adolescence in 1900, and secondly, around his own competing interpretation of the phenomenon. He rejects the idea that adolescents were "first and foremost engaged in a generational conflict," and that "they were heroic rebels fighting for the emancipation ofthe individual" (11). Rather, Neubauer beUeves that the primary formative influence in this period was peer-group culture, due to "the sudden sprouting of organizations (whether founded by adults or initiated by youth itself) that forced the individual back into bonds" (11). In the last two chapters of the book Neubauer discusses numerous youth groups, Vol. 19 (1995): 144 THE COMPAKATIST focussing his attention on the Boy Scouts in England and the Wandervogel and Jugendbewegung (youth movement) in Germany. In the opening chapters, Neubauer investigates numerous Uterary examples of adolescence, comparing Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Mann's 7b;iio Kroger, Musü's Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless, Larbaud's Fermina Marquez, Alain-Fournier's Le grand Meaulnes, Hesse's Demian, and LacreteUe's Silbermann. The author's concern in these initial chapters is with the narrator/ protagonist relationship and "the protagonist's shift from mimetic to metaphoric language" (18). One could weU argue that these sections are the most theoreticaUy chaUenging and thus perhaps the most interesting in the book. Moving to a discussion of adolescent groups, Neubauer further demonstrates his comprehensive famiUarity with European texts on adolescence, discussing Kipling's Stalky & Co., Gide's 77ie Counterfeiters, Molnár's The Pal Street Boys, and several novels by Barres including his first trilogy, Le culte de moi. Many authors who attempt such vast surveys of Uterary works often merely juxtapose texts, or at best draw occasional parallels, leaving much ofthe comparative work to the reader, but Neubauer in no way shies away from complex analyses and in-depth comparisons. In this regard he provides a model comparative Uterary scholars should heed. Although readers might be interested in paraUels between turnof -the-century works and later novels about adolescence, Neubauer strictly Umits this study to works pubUshed within his fin-de-siècle framework (1881-1925). In simüarly circumscribing his "Uterature of adolescence" as a genre, he proceeds in a curiously negative fashion by...