Description

On Douglas Coupland's Generation X. Wrote this one in part to impress a girl (might it not also impress you?). Explores why Generation X is about narrating a world so that it seems stable, dependable. (Note: on this one, I'd recommend reading the "word" version--the prof's comments on the scanned version are annoying--she really had no clue.

First paragraph:

Generation X purports to offer “tales for an accelerated culture,” but it really offers tales which service the needs of a select group of people—those who constitute Generation X. Its aim is therapeutic—it seeks not so much to scold but to heal; but if we care about such things, it may yet still be judged a satiric text. For healing requires the construction of a group surround, a secure, distinctive sense of themselves as different from all others, and recent scholarship has it that is something satires are wont to do too. Though we may not be prepared to imagine satires as as much about the construction of groups as they are about criticizing them, in The Literature of Satire Charles Knight argues that eighteenth-century satires, at least, did work to help develop a specific kind of group—nations, and they did this by “celebrating” “the characteristics of one’s nation” while “mock[ing]” “those of others” (58-9).