| This dissertation examines how the term "yuppie" represents a complicated interplay between middle-class aspirations and the desire to engage in bohemianism at a time when neoliberalism was re-shaping public discourse and introducing free-market ideologies into various areas of public life. As I argue in this study, yuppiedom involves a complex set of lifestyle markers and aspirations that are simultaneously desired and abjected. Within yuppiedom, subculture and bohemianism provide the figurative terrain of youth that young middle-class subjects must navigate as part of a larger narrative of maturation.;The role of yuppies in gentrification is also discussed with particular attention to the rapid gentrification of New York City through the nineteen-eighties. Urban bohemias provide spaces which appeal to bourgeois desires but which simultaneously must be tamed, regulated, and ultimately eliminated by the gentrifying classes. I argue that abjection becomes a critical mode by which bourgeois subjectivities are formed and that a fear of the urban "other" (whether it be the homeless, the marginalized, or the unruly spaces of urban bohemias) helps to define the boundaries of these middle-class subjectivities.;I frame the analytic and historical work of the project with examinations of six key texts: Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, Tama Janowitz's Slaves of New York, Mary Gaitskill's Bad Behavior, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Candice Bushnell's Sex and the City, and Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. The analysis of these texts traces yuppiedom from its origins in New York City in the nineteen-eighties to the globalization of its ideologies in what I term the post-yuppie texts of the nineteen-nineties.;Literary representations of yuppies frame this narrative of maturation using elements of the bildungsroman form, yet this occurs during a period when cultural notions of youth have shifted and the idea of youth is extended well into what would once have been considered adulthood. This extended adolescence is then represented in popular "yuppie" texts that confuse and conflate the maturation process with the development of an adult consumer consciousness. |
