Young Generation Research Paper

The transitional period between childhood and adulthood, the teenage years, is both difficult and crucial. Adolescents face changes not only on the physiological level but also on the intellectual and emotional levels. Naturally, beliefs, attitudes and even relationships are constantly examined and reevaluated during this period, often leading to confusion. This confusion most often manifests itself as teenage angst and anger. Most often society reduces teenage anger to mere moodiness, ignoring the complexity of its underlying reasons. However, by examining the place of adolescents in the context of society, the concept of teenage anger gains depth. Adolescents are trapped between two worlds: childhood innocence and the real world represented

Class can be defined as "a group of people with a common relationship to the structures of political and economic power within a particular society" (Grant 163). Hence, adults can be viewed as a class in that they, as a group, control the political and economic structures of society, and by extension children are a class in that they, as a group, are subordinates. Naturally, in any class system the dominant class seeks to maintain its position. According to the work of Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, this happens through hegemony; "the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group" ("Hegemony"). According to Gramsci, through hegemony the dominant class presents its ideologies as 'common sense'.

As Gramsci makes clear, common sense is established by a process of consent to ruling class attitudes and interests which are thereby accepted by society at large as being in its own general interests. What is specific and partial is therefore universalized and what is cultural is naturalized to the point of being taken for granted in a view of the world as simply 'the way things are'. ("Common Sense")

In the case of adults and children, children take for granted the power relations in society. They accept the world view that is presented to them as children and rarely challenge

However, adolescents are outside of the class of children; they are not organic to it and do not have an accurate image of how it really is. In that sense, these adolescents are pseudo-organic intellectuals because they do not belong to the children class nor seek to promote its wellbeing, but they construct an idealized (pseudo) children class and try to promote its constructed ideology to resist adult hegemony. This constructed arrangement is unnatural and would probably cause these pseudo-organic intellectuals to become frustrated and angry whenever their construction is threatened. J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951) deals with the world of adolescents with surprising insight as "Mr. Salinger had unerring radar for the feelings of teenage angst and vulnerability and anger" (Kakutani). As its protagonist, Holden Caulfield, struggles to find his place in the adult-children class system; he displays the anger and frustrations which are expected of the pseudo-organic