ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the ‘no prospects’ employment for the American youth in the 1990s. In this, Clerks and Generation X share many discursive strains common to the youth subcultures of the 1980s and 1990s. Equally, artworks about such characters and their connections to the world of employment are not necessarily a particularly modern invention, either. The balance between the demands of the world of employment and the spirit of the individual subject is still of vital importance to the film’s underlying rationale. This transformation was compounded when, during the 1980s, the US, like several other major economies, would experience significant deindustrialisation, leading to many jobs in this sector being replaced by those in the service industry. The critical difference between these early versions of Romanticism and those we encounter in the late twentieth century is that the modern world has largely eroded ideas of the transcendental or of the divine.
