Clark University - Clark News summer 2004
Inventing adolescence (fall 2004)
Clark history echoes in a course about teenagers in film and literature
By Wendy Linden
 |
 |
 |
Clark professors Timothy Shary and Beth Gale.
Photos by Tammy Woodard M.A. '98 |
Where would we be without adolescence? So much of our culture, music, literature, film and art are driven by adolescent ideas ‹or aimed at the people who have them. It's easy to forget that the concept of adolescence didn't exist until the early 20th century, when it was initially described by Clark's first president, G. Stanley Hall.
Reexamining adolescence
Excerpts from Hall's two-volume, 1,300-page magnum opus "Adolescence: Its Psychology, and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education" are just part of the syllabus for professors Tim Shary's and Beth Gale's course "Images of Youth in French and American Narratives" this past spring. Students read and watched French and American novels and films on a variety of topics related to adolescence such as girl power, youth crime, youth culture, girl gangs, sex, love and gender to help them understand post-World War II images of youth and youth culture in the United States and France.
Among their many discoveries, students found that "some of the French films and novels were much more political than their American counterparts from the same period," says Gale. "In some cases, French adolescence was steeped in greater political awareness." The syllabus included the book and film versions of Joyce Carol Oates' "Foxfire" and Francoise Sagan's "Bonjour Tristesse," as well as the American classics "Catcher in the Rye," "Rebel Without a Cause," the 1960s film "Wild in the Streets," and "The Second Sex" by female French writer Simone de Beauvoir.
Hall: The "Father of Adolescence"
And, of course, the students read Hall's groundbreaking work. Gale and Shary note that Hall was the first person to fully study and identify what happens to children in that vital time between childhood and adulthood. Both found it astonishing that no one else had looked at children's development in this way until the early 20th century. Gale and Shary felt that they couldn't do a class that looked at teenagers and adolescence without reading Hall. Adolescence, as a codified stage in childhood development, didn't exist before his work. What's more, they note, this year is the 100th anniversary of its publication. The timing seemed perfect.
But Shary adds, "Our students, to be fair, didn't take too kindly to Hall. He hasn't aged well. Particularly compared to Simone de Beauvoir, they found Hall to be rather Draconian. And some of our female students found his writing rather sexist." While students found his ideas about girls and their problems outdated, Shary and Gale tried to put Hall's perspective into its 100-year-old context.
Shary and Gale focused on three things in Hall's work: girls' education, juvenile delinquency and adolescent love. They and their students found that some of his ideas about adolescence were perceptive and sensitive for 1904. Yet, throughout his work, they also discovered many sexist and ill-informed ideas about teens and their lifestyles.
Shary notes that Hall was a psychologist, not a surveyor of popular culture, and he was writing at a time long before the term "teenager" was ever used, and when less than 10 percent of children in America graduated from high school. Instead, boys went to school until their early teens and then went to work, and girls got married. "This partly explains why he so often erred in understanding youth culture, because there was no culture of youth then as it would come to be known after World War II. Were it not for Hall's efforts and ideas, the trends of adolescent psychology, cultural studies‹and even my field of film studies‹would be much further behind in understanding youth today."
Clark psychology professor and department chair Jaan Valsiner agrees. "Hall's 'Adolescence' is recognized as the basis for all our contemporary psychology of adolescence. It's exciting to see his work becoming important in our contemporary teaching across boundaries of the disciplines."
Cross-disciplinary teaching
In their course, Gale and Shary pooled their collective expertise to offer students a look into two disciplines and two cultures‹screen studies, which is Shary's research area, and French literature, which is one of Gale's.
"When I came to Clark in 2001 and heard there was a faculty member on campus who also worked on coming of age and adolescence, I wanted to meet this person," recalls Gale. "Almost immediately after meeting Tim I said, 'Let's do a course together.'"
By fall 2002, thanks to a generous grant from the Higgins School of Humanities to develop the course, the idea came to fruition.
Personal narratives
The result of Shary's and Gale's collaboration was nothing but positive according to the two professors. While the course focused on the real-life experiences of teens through books and film, both professors were amazed at their students' candor when relating the course themes to examples from their own lives. Shary and Gale believe that when young people have the opportunity to think about themselves in relation to what they're learning, they find the experience much more valuable. While their students were analyzing texts and films, the professors note, they also had to confront a lot of issues around gender, delinquency, drug use, death, race, sexuality and, sometimes, in terms of images of themselves.
Interestingly, almost half of the students in the class volunteered and worked with local troubled youth, which allowed them to integrate what they were studying with the personal narratives of real teenagers.
Gale and Shary agree that integrating G. Stanley Hall's century-old work into the 21st-century Clark classroom made the course all the richer for them and their students.
How times have changedGale and Shary say Hall was probably the most controversial of the authors they read, and also by far the oldest. In their study of his text, "Adolescence: Its Psychology, and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education," the professors asked their students to consider what kinds of things were being thought in 1904 and why even then some of these notions were radical for their time. One of the things the students thought was funny, Gale and Shary recall, was when Hall talks about what boys and girls find unattractive in the opposite sex. This was a favorite passage:
'In dress, the order of dislikes mentioned is earrings worn by men, lost teeth, neglect of style, bangs, thumb rings, hat on one side in men, short hair in women, baldness, ultra style, clothes that do not fit, monocles, flashy ties, untidy linen, handkerchiefs with colors, furs and rings for men, cheap or coarse dress etc. |
|
 |
|
Clarknews Fall 2004
|
|
|
|
