Contemporary YA Literature

1. Contemporary YA Literature • The Hidden Adult • The Problem Novel as Catalyst for Contemporary YA Literature • First Person Point of View • Focalization • Engaging Narration • The Business Angle • Ypulse and Teen Marketing • Wattpad, Figment, and Inkpop • The Critic’s Job

2. The Hidden Adult YA Literature Before 1970 Post-1970s Adult agendas become diverse in nature and often disappear into the fabric of the text Adult characters seen as fallible or depicted as absent Verisimilitude, a questioned concept in adult realism, becomes a staple of YA lit. • Adult agendas out in the open • Adult characters seen as a source of wisdom • Dialogue and situations reflected a narrow and homogenous view of adolescence that did not always match the lived experiences of teenagers

3. The Problem Novel • Influenced by the liberatory movements of the 1960s, many authors hoped that YA literature could • Address social problems as they related to youth • Encourage young readers, via protagonists’ behavior, that they could solve their problems in the multiple ways, some of which did not involve adults at all • Reflect the interests, speech patterns, and social realities of actual youth.

4. The Problem Novel • The Problem Novel, as the phrase suggests, dealt with conflicts typical to adolescence during the 1970s, including drug use, suicide, divorce, and discrimination. • Judy Blume’s Forever both participated and resisted the idea that sexual intercourse was a problem. • As you will see when you read Trites, Blume wrote forever in order to counter the depiction of sexual intercourse as only presenting a young protagonist with pain and crisis. • What you will need to consider is whether or not Blume was successful in her stated aim.

5. Point of View

6. Point of View • One of the key features of contemporary YA literature is that it is often focalized through first-person narrators whose language seems age appropriate. • To focalize “refers to the presentation of a scene through the subjective perception of a character. The term can refer to the person doing the focalizing (the focalizer) or to the object that is being perceived (the focalized object)” (Felluga). • Whether young readers identify with a protagonist because she reminds them of themselves or if they learn about new subjectivities by identifying with a character who seems to be different from themselves, the goal for most authors is to create characters who seem to be believable as teens and to focalize the story through them, often via first person narration.

7. Engaging Narration • In her application of narrative theory to young adult literature, Andrea Schwenke Wylie describes the way that various types of first-person narration work to “establish confidence between the narrator and the narratee” such that the narratee feels like “the listener in the story rather than a reader outside the story” (192). • For instance, in Forever, Judy Blume creates a first-person narrator in Katherine whose words are so convincingly rendered that many young readers assume she was a “real person,” just like them.

8. Engaging Narration • Another way that authors can encourage readers to identify with a first-person narrator is to draw that protagonist in such general terms that many, many readers will be able to place themselves into that character’s perspective. That’s a good thing, right? • Scholars such as Michael Cadden would ask us to think twice about this situation. If readers are exposed to only one compelling voice in a narrative, then they are more likely to accept the attitudes, ideas, and opinions that exist behind that voice – and to do so uncritically.

9. Engaging Narration • When authors are interested in appealing to a mainstream audience, they tend to put forward ideas that are conventional in nature and that support ideas about social issues that encourage conformity. The perceived closeness between the reader and the narrator can create a bridge that crosses over – and ignores – alternative viewpoints or ideas. • We will be addressing all of these issues surrounding point of view as we work through the texts this semester.

10. The Business of YA Literature • Adult authors have many motivating factors for writing YA literature, but there are other individuals involved in the production of the texts you will read this semester, and I want to be sure that you are thinking about their potential impact. • Any author who pursues publication via an established publishing house spends significant time working with an editor. Editors evaluate manuscripts, use sales figures and focus groups to determine marketing strategies, and encourage authors to find a balance between their aesthetic impulses and their ability to sell texts. Publishing is a business.

11. The Business of YA Literature • Another important group involved in YA Literature is the American Library Association, the organization that represents libraries, librarians, and their concerns. The ALA sponsors most of the important awards that honor the authors of YA Literature; it also encourages youth participation in reading, reviewing, and discussing YA Literature. • Given that an award-winning text is guaranteed to generate significant revenue for the publisher and publicity for the author, the entire awards process deserves our attention. What criteria are generally applied? What authors are favored and what authors are ignored?

12. The Business of YA Literature • YA Literature is also shaped by academics, whose scholarly work helps to define and to question the category. Since the early 1960s, children’s and adolescent literature has been the subject of serious scholarly attention, as you learned in your assigned readings. • Professors of YA literature can influence the sales and the reputation of authors; some industry insiders joke that the primary readers of YA literature are college students who have been assigned texts by their professors!

13. The Business of YA Literature • One strand of research that I am currently conducting considers whether or not young people themselves are having a greater say in the production and content of YA Literature. • Via the use of online participatory communities such as Wattpad, Figment, and Inkpop, teenagers are discussing, writing, and reviewing YA literature, acts that may be enriching their own educations, but are definitely providing publishers with a direct marketing resource in terms of learning what is “hot” in YA literature.

14. The Critic’s Job • This semester, we will ask questions regarding the the content of YA literature (literary concerns), the production and design of YA literature (material concerns)and the context of YA literature (cultural concerns). • As you prepare to read Blume’sForever and read excerpts from Trites’ Disturbing the Universe, I wanted to underscore that thinking about all of these questions is really in service of a larger question: How Do Texts Do Things?

15. The Critic’s Job: Literary Concerns • In its simplest form, literary analysis concerns "how texts do things” within the text itself -- for instance, when Trites applies theories of power to a novel such as Forever, she's really considering how Blume structures a novel about sexual maturation so that she can both inform teen readers about sex AND uphold societal norms regarding sex.  Trites' essay on Forever is effective because she explains how meaning (in this case, beliefs about how teenagers should learn about sexuality and/or practice sexuality) is conveyed through the storyline of the novel.

16. The Critic’s Job: Literary Concerns • There are multiple ways for a critic to get at an understanding of "how texts do things."  A noted feminist critic, Angela Hubler, has analyzed the way that Blume appears to make subtle, but consistent, statements about body image in Forever.  Hubler argues that Katherine's desire to be in control manifests itself in her attitudes towards sex and towards maintaining her body.  Not only does Hubler see this as a central feature of Forever, she also notes that this relationship plays out in many adolescent novels. 

17. The Critic’s Job: Literary Concerns • This semester, you should orient your thinking about literary concerns so that you are asking about any novel you read, “How does this text work?" OR "How does this author structure his text or portray his characters' actions in order to convey meaning?”

18. The Critic’s Job: Material Concerns • Equally important is the critic’s ability to ask questions about how a text is produced, marketed, and consumed. • For instance, the last book we will read this semester, Handler and Kalman’sWhy We Broke Up, is written by Lemony Snicket, the author of the popular and quirky Series of Unfortunate Events books. However, when Handler decided to write a serious YA novel, he chose to use his own name. We will be considering the implications of this decision, as it provides a window into how he and his publisher wanted readers to approach the novel.

19. The Critic’s Job: Cultural Considerations • A critic also asks the question, “Why this text in this way at this time?” Such a query underscores the impact that cultural practices have on the production of literature. Given that cultural ideas regarding adolescence and YA literature have changed over time, we need to be sure to read a book both in terms of when it was written and in terms of how it is now received (vs. how it was originally received).

20. The Critic’s Job: Cultural Concerns • I would like to end this lecture by quoting from a blog post that I wrote that last time I taught Forever to an ENGL 3840 class. Thinking about the issues I raise brings together both literary and cultural concerns, and it underscores the way that we, as readers, often bring our own assumptions with us to the act of analyzing a book. • The excerpt follows:

21. The Critic’s Job Probably one of the more interesting moments in our discussion of Forever and character development occurred when I noted that no one had mentioned that Katherine was white.  The default character in so many YA novels is a middle class white girl or boy that Katherine's ethnic or racial background may not have seemed important enough to mention -- in fact, most readers -- regardless of their own backgrounds -- may not have thought to categorize Katherine as being white because they unconsciously expected her to be white.  I want to underscore this idea because had the book featured a protagonist who was not white, that fact would have probably occurred to everyone immediately as a distinguishing feature. 

22. The Critic’s Job • During the course of the semester, I'm hoping that we will have many moments such as this one, when we are able to recognize the things that we take for granted and then ask ourselves why we have done so.  Most importantly, individuals who are in the minority in a society or who have less power in a society are typically required to identify with subject positions other than their own.  For instance, it's a given that girls will read and enjoy books that feature boy protagonists. 

23. The Critic’s Job • Consider the Harry Potter phenomenon -- the books are focalized through Harry about 95% of the time, yet the audience for the novels has been extremely diverse.  If Rowling had chosen to create a protagonist called Harriet Potter, do you think as many boys would have read her novels?   Rowling's publisher was so concerned with gender issues that he asked her to use initials so that early readers of the series wouldn't know that she was a woman.