generation x douglas coupland sparknotes

What other book can deliver Conversational-Slumming (enjoying a chat for its lack of intellectual rigour), or Personality Tithe (the price paid by an individual for being part of a couple)? And should you be a restless adult, doing risky things in your 40s to compensate for your diligent youth, perhaps that’s not a midlife crisis but Rebellion Postponement. Took me a while, but I’m glad I finally toured Coup-Land, a place where word-flair is as sharp as the soothsaying. This same inheritance itch prompts the stone-cold mantra: Pull-The-Plug, Slice-The-Pie. Indeed, in his own Emotional Ketchup Burst, the character of Dag resents his elders for 'grabbing the best piece of cake first and then putting a barbed-wire fence around the rest'. Hipster glimpses sparkle too, a cult that Coupland imagines as Obscurism (lacing your talk with esoteric references to showcase contempt for mass culture) and Musical-Hairsplitting (classifying music into picayune genres such as neo-alt-folk).Īnd for every generation there’s naturally a gap, manifesting into Boomer Envy and Clique Maintenance ('the need of one generation to see the next as deficient in order to bolster its own collective ego'). Be that as it may, Coupland adds its special sauce, defining the label as 'a low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector, frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one'. The Oxford Dictionary, in fact, credits German-Israeli sociologist Amitai Etzioni as coining McJob five years before Generation X appeared.

Footnoting these yarns are the neologisms, from Metaphasia (inability to perceive metaphor) to Mental Ground Zero (where you see yourself when the world ends – typically a shopping mall). Other articles where Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture is discussed: Douglas Coupland: Coupland’s first published novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991), describes the lives of three affluent, disaffected Californians in their 20s by way of a series of stories supplemented with cartoons and dictionary-style definitions of cultural buzzwords. They yoyo from road trip to party circuit, from Seattle to Japan, sharing stories in a stoner Decameron. A raffish set of McJobbers – Andy, Dag and Claire – exhibits 101-ism as a hobby: 'the tendency to pick apart all aspects of life using half-understood pop psychology'.

Generation x douglas coupland sparknotes