Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at four grammars of life story telling which frame ‘youth’ in very different ways and compares the classical bildungsroman with contemporary coming- of-age stories to illustrate how these codings have become destabilised

Paper long abstract:

The framings of 'youth' have always been embedded in normative principles of periodisation and predicament encoded in culturally specific grammars of life history telling. In previous research I examined the historical development and articulation of four such codes : apprenticeship, inheritance, vocation and career.

This paper draws on more recent research to examine the destabilising of these codings by a pervasive shift to a post Fordist just-in-time production of the self. I will suggest that for 'generation rent' the vocation paradigm has become increasingly instrumentalised, while career is disconnected from real opportunity structures, and reverts to its original meaning of 'careering about'. Meanwhile on the other side of the class tracks, the signposts to growing up are no clearer . Apprenticeship is no longer to a patrimony of proto-domestic labour skills, but to an imaginary inheritance embodied in more or less ethnicised memoryscapes. This argument will be illustrated by comparing the classical adolescent bildingsroman with some contemporary coming of age stories . The paper concludes by arguing that the contemporary youth question has come to represent a more general condition of precarity, a crisis in life history making in which positions of precocious maturity and chronic immaturity are both culturally celebrated and disavowed.