Naslov
Popular Culture and Youth as Its Audience in Croatia from the Mid-1950s to the Mid-1970s

Autori
Požgaj, Petra

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, neobjavljeni rad, znanstveni

Skup
Children’s Literature Summer School

Mjesto i datum
Antwerpen, Belgija, 04.07.2022. - 08.07.2022

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Nije recenziran

Ključne riječi
popular culture ; youth ; Yugoslavia

Sažetak
Noting the importance of popular culture and youth not only as drivers of social and cultural change, but also as the objects of research in social sciences and humanities in the post-WWII period, my thesis offers an examination of the various articulations of the relationship between popular culture and youth as its primary audience in Croatia, observed in the broader context of socialist Yugoslavia. Consisting of two complementary parts, it focuses on the period from the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s, which will be shown to be crucial not only for the formation of the local field of popular culture, but also for the construction of the figure of Yugoslav socialist youth. The first part explores a number of legal, academic and literary sources functioning as the contemporary sites of the articulation of the discourses on youth and popular culture in order to demonstrate the significance of youth as the subject expected to carry out the Yugoslav socialist project and to analyse the discourses that inform that figure. Furthermore, this part of the thesis outlines the discursive logic behind the Yugoslav socialist society’s attitude towards the emergence of the field of popular culture and the way that attitude is inflected by the awareness of the affinity between popular culture and youth as its audience. The second part then focuses on an analysis of cultural texts explicitly addressed at youth as consumers of popular culture, namely youth magazines issued by commercial publishing companies, which, themselves a part of popular culture, rely on youth’s interest in other forms of popular culture, primarily film and music. Demonstrating a shift from discourses invoking dominant socialist values in order to produce an idealized figure of Yugoslav socialist youth to which the readers should aspire, shunning popular culture, to the emergence of a value system specific to the field of popular culture, acknowledging the investment of youth in various forms of popular culture, it raises the question of the extent to which it is actually possible to speak of the putative exceptionality of Yugoslav popular culture and youth as opposed to their Western counterparts.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

POVEZANOST RADA