Gidget

Pamela Robertson Wojcik is Professor in the Department of Film, TV and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame and Past President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, writing about mobility and placelessness in American cinema.

• Introduction: An Array of Gidgets: The Transmedia Phenomenon Gidget1. Gidget: The Little Girl with Big Ideas: An Intertextual Origina 2. Becoming Single: Gidget Betwixt and Between3. Gidget Goes All Over the Place, But Always Back to Moondoggie4. Gidget Gets Small: Containing Gidget on the Small ScreenConclusion. Gidget Shoots the Curl

In tight pages rich in resonant argument and grounded in the rigorous research she is so well-known for, Pamela Robertson Wojcik builds from the singular phenomenon of Gidget to deal broadly with American youth culture in the long postwar period in all its complexity. Great insights dot every page, from, to take just a few examples, the impact of the salacious yet existential novels of Françoise Sagan, to the role of phonograph and telephone in girls’ lives, to America’s touristic fascination from the 1950s on with turning the world into its playground, to the rise (and then mainstream cooptation) of surfer culture as counter-culture, and so on. Importantly, Gidget itself emerges from the analysis productively transformed as Wojcik shows that it was no simple, single work of culture but a multiplicity of iterations, each transforming the other and rendering no one version of this energetic young teenager the definitive statement of her place in complicated social times.Dana Polan, Cinema Studies, New York University, USA