James F. Austin – författare

Recipient of the 1993 American Society of Criminology's August Vollmer Award for distinguished contribution to the profession of criminology Youth violence continues to rise at an alarming rate in a civilization that is being characterized as the most violent in history. Global economic transformations; weakened family, school, and church structures; and an inefficient juvenile justice system only add to the doomsday projections for troubled youngsters, who see little in the way of preventive advocacy. Reinventing Juvenile Justice presents an honest albeit painful view of the current status of justice for young offenders. Could it be that the celebrated "children's court" has outlived its usefulness? This central question is raised by the authors in exploring whether the juvenile court can or should survive in the years ahead. With no core constituency in the political arena, the pressure to handle more children in adult courts and correctional facilities will only increase and the challenge of needed reform will go unmet. Among some of the other issues discussed are juvenile justice laws and court procedures, influences on probation petition and detention decisions, and the influence of gender and race on taking youth into custody. Students and caring professionals will find the invaluable material in this book of tremendous assistance in addressing a generation of young people on whom our world's future depends. "This book is informative, not least about developments in the U.S.A, and is easy to read." --Youth and Policy "The authors have substantial reputations in the field and are well qualified to make recommendations. This book compares favorably with books offering different assessments and solutions." --Choice "[The book] has great market potential as a juvenile justice text and supplemental text. . . . [It] is very readable and well organized. . . . It will also have a broad appeal in the practitioner community . . . . Youth correction workers, probation officers, juvenile and family court judges, prosecutors, public defenders, child advocates, and youth service workers will find this to be a useful book." --Ira M. Schwartz, Professor and Director, The Center for the Study of Youth Policy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Proust, Pastiche, and the Postmodern, or Why Style Matters argues against the traditional view that Marcel Proust wrote pastiches, that is, texts that imitate the style of another author, to master his literary predecessors while sharpening his writerly quill. On the contrary, James F. Austin demonstrates that Proust’s oeuvre, and In Search of Lost Time in particular, deploy pastiche to other ends: Proust’s pastiches, in fact, “do things with words” to create powerful real-world effects. His works are indeed performative acts that forge social relationships, redefine our ideas of literature, and even work against oppressive political and economic discourses.Building on the “speech-act” theory of J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, and J. Hillis Miller, and on the postmodern theory of Fredric Jameson, this book not only elucidates the performative nature of pastiche, but also shows that the famous “Goncourt” pastiche from In Search of Lost Time has attracted so much attention because it already attained the postmodern; that is, it eliminated temporal depth and experience, transforming time itself into a nostalgic style of an era, and into the sort of aestheticized surface that came to define postmodernism decades later. To reflect this transformation of pastiche, this work rearticulates its history in France around Proust. Reconfiguring a scholastic, classically-inspired pedagogical tradition based on imitation, and breaking with the dominant satirical practice, Proust’s work opened up possibilities in the twentieth century for a new kind of pastiche: playful and performative in the literary field, and postmodern in a French cinema that, as with the Goncourt pastiche, represents time as the visual style of an era, whether unreflexively in “heritage” films such as Régis Wargnier’s Indochine, or discerningly in Eric Rohmer’s Lady and the Duke, which uses period pictorial and painterly conventions to illustrate how the representation of history onscreen typically flattens time into style.

Proust, Pastiche, and the Postmodern, or Why Style Matters argues against the traditional view that Marcel Proust wrote pastiches, that is, texts that imitate the style of another author, to master his literary predecessors while sharpening his writerly quill. On the contrary, James F. Austin demonstrates that Proust’s oeuvre, and In Search of Lost Time in particular, deploy pastiche to other ends: Proust’s pastiches, in fact, “do things with words” to create powerful real-world effects. His works are indeed performative acts that forge social relationships, redefine our ideas of literature, and even work against oppressive political and economic discourses.Building on the “speech-act” theory of J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, and J. Hillis Miller, and on the postmodern theory of Fredric Jameson, this book not only elucidates the performative nature of pastiche, but also shows that the famous “Goncourt” pastiche from In Search of Lost Time has attracted so much attention because it already attained the postmodern; that is, it eliminated temporal depth and experience, transforming time itself into a nostalgic style of an era, and into the sort of aestheticized surface that came to define postmodernism decades later. To reflect this transformation of pastiche, this work rearticulates its history in France around Proust. Reconfiguring a scholastic, classically-inspired pedagogical tradition based on imitation, and breaking with the dominant satirical practice, Proust’s work opened up possibilities in the twentieth century for a new kind of pastiche: playful and performative in the literary field, and postmodern in a French cinema that, as with the Goncourt pastiche, represents time as the visual style of an era, whether unreflexively in “heritage” films such as Régis Wargnier’s Indochine, or discerningly in Eric Rohmer’s Lady and the Duke, which uses period pictorial and painterly conventions to illustrate how the representation of history onscreen typically flattens time into style.