We have come to think of teenagers as a breed apart—ask any parent of one. But as a driver of culture, as a consumer niche, as a

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问题     We have come to think of teenagers as a breed apart—ask any parent of one. But as a driver of culture, as a consumer niche, as a state of contrariness, the subspecies known as teenager wasn’t even identified until World War II, the point at which British music writer Jon Savage’s fascinating new book, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture 1875-1945, ends.【B1】___________
    Amid the chaos of mass urbanization in the late 19th century, teens were already notoriously drawn to trouble. The street gangs that carved up New York City back then were fueled by crime, but many members joined primarily for the sake of the fringe benefits—access to the forbidden pleasures of drink, drugs and sex.【B2】_______________________For example, the Parisian gangsters of that era—known as Apaches—wore silk scarves and, writes Savage, "an air of bourgeois arrogance." In England’s inner cities, where there were regular pitched battles between gangs, the look was edgier. A youth worker in the 1890s noted that a proper Manchester "scuttler" could be identified by a loose white scarf, plastered-down hair, bell-bottom trousers.
    In 1898, G. Stanley Hall, an American psychology pioneer, defined a new stage of life called "adolescence," characterized by parental conflict, moodiness and risk taking. Contrary to the disciplinarian ethos of the day, Hall recommended that adolescents be given "room to be lazy." His prediction that "we shall one day attract the youth of the world by our unequaled liberty and opportunity," not only prophesied a culture that would revere youth but also patented it as American.
    【B3】______________The view of a German lieutenant colonel, Baron Col-mar von der Goltz, in 1883 that "the strength of a nation lies in its youth," was pretty much shared by all the muscle-flexing European powers of that era. World War I ultimately spent the lives of as many as 3 million of Europe’s adolescents, and the pangs were felt for decades. "The Great War," Savage writes, "forever destroyed the automatic obedience that elders expected from their children."
    In the Europe of the 1920s, that generational dissent was mostly expressed either in the arts (Jean Cocteau, Fritz Lang, Aldous Huxley) or in outright decadence.【B4】_________Nowhere more so than in Germany, where the Wandervogel, a popular, free-spirited, back-to-nature youth movement whose non-political ideals had survived World War I, found itself lujacked in the 1930s by the Hitler Youth. By 1939, membership of the Hitler Youth stood at 8.9 million.
    【B5】________________The  self-styled  Swing  Kids  of Hamburg and the Zazous of Paris paid a heavy price in beatings and scalpings for growing their hair, wearing Zoot suits, and dirty dancing to banned jazz. "Instead of uniformity, they proclaimed difference; instead of aggression, overt sexuality," writes Savage, with as good a recipe as any for the teenage era that was about to dawn.
    Teenage is a bracing reminder that the tides of teen rebellion after 1945 were always about more than loud music and fashion. That story has often been told, not least by Savage in his 1991 history of punk, England’s Dreaming.
    [A]   His prediction was proved right. But in Europe, any such optimism was overwhelmed by a half-century of war and talk of war.
    [B]   Despite the clamps on freedom during the first years of World War II, the pockets of youthful defiance that Savage describes in Germany and occupied France showed a daring contempt for fascist authority, expressing it to the beat of American pop culture.
    [C]  But caught up in a renewed spiral to war, youths, many of them jobless, were soon being courted by political groups on the left and right.
    [D]  His 576-page trawl through the social commentary, memoirs and report of Europe and the U.S. in those decades shows how all the indicators of modern youth culture—the generational antagonism, the moral panics, the idealism, the shocking dress sense—were in place long before teenagers made a name for themselves.
    [E]  What’s yet to be accounted for is the curious disappearance in recent years of the generation gap between teens and their elders.
    [F]  And then, as ever since, young toughs also had an eye to fashion.
    [G]   Poverty and lack of education were recognized early on as the root problem of these disaffected youths.
【B3】

选项

答案A

解析 空格前为上一段,其末尾处提到美国心理学家G.史坦利.霍尔关于崇尚年轻文化这一现象的预言(His prediction),传递出一种积极的信息。本段空格后的内容却提到残酷的战争一味把年轻人当作武器的事实。前后内容之间存在反差和对比。A中的His prediction与上文对应,此外句中but表转折,正好引出空格后要说的反差情况。A代入空格处,符合上下文的语义逻辑,故为正确答案。
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