Mentions of "My So-Called Life" in Books

[Sascha]

Amazon.com has this amazing new feature: You can search the content of books in their online store. Just enter your search term in the usual search box and click "Go!". So I did a search for "My So Called Life" (don't forget the quotes) and it really works. The search brings up a lot of literature related to gay topics (mostly related to Ricky's character / Wilson Cruz, but also a funny "if Angela were a lesbian"-snippet) and some Shakespeare-related stuff (->Claire Danes->R&J). You can also see scans of selected pages when you're logged in. A really nifty tool.

This link may also work:
Amazon.com Book Search for "My So-Called Life"

[Jody Barsch]

I do not have the book in front of me (it is on the 5th floor in the UCSB library), nor am I sure I can easily find the passage (although I will look), But last year when I as earning my Masters in Education, I wrote two papers on My So-Called Life, I encountered an author who was writing on adolescence covered in the media. If I remember correctly, she compaired MSCL to Dawson's Creek and 90210 (which in itself I find offenesive, sorry of some of you Lifers are also Dawson and 90210 fans) and grouped them all together as shows that are unrealistic, underdeveloped, and that have no truth of real adolescent life in them. Clearly she never watched the whole MSCL series. Just a little info on the topic of books. I will try to locate the passage.

[Jody Barsch]

I hope that this post will not be terribly repetitive, but I did a search and di not find it anywhere else, so forgive me if this is old news, but I just wanted to make a book reccomendation for those of you who have not already read it: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. It is a beautifully appealing book about adolescence and innocence following Charlie through his freshman year of high school as recorded through letters.

[Jody Barsch]

The text I referring to is by Nancy Lasko and entitled Act Your Age: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. Lasko accuses My So-Called Life of occurring in “abstract adventure time, where changes do not register on the characters; for example their minds do not develop. … [Producing] narratives that are ahistorical and decontextualized [making] it notoriously hard to paste on context."

[Jack]

"Producing narratives that are ahistorical and decontextualized making it notoriously hard to paste on context."

What?

Please translate.

[kappster]

I hope that this post will not be terribly repetitive, but I did a search and di not find it anywhere else, so forgive me if this is old news, but I just wanted to make a book reccomendation for those of you who have not already read it: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. It is a beautifully appealing book about adolescence and innocence following Charlie through his freshman year of high school as recorded through letters.

Thanks for the recommendation...checked it out on amazon and thought it looked interesting...haven't read a book in a really long time so I am going to give it a try.

[Sascha]

BTW: Google is now offering a similar service like amazon. If you add "site: print.google.com" to your search query, it searches in the excerpts of 60,000 books.

Try this link to search for "Claire Danes" in Google Print

[Sascha]

BTW: Google is now offering a similar service like amazon. If you add "site: print.google.com" to your search query, it searches in the excerpts of 60,000 books.

Try this link to search for "Claire Danes" in Google Print

Google expanded their service over the past months, you can now read excerpts from My So-Called Life Goes On or a very early review in variety for MSCL from 1994

Just search for site:print.google.com "my so called life" at google.com.