Abstract
This chapter introduces the issues at stake in the book and outlines the theoretical and methodological approaches. The book begins with questions that arise in the classroom: is all reading that kids do “good”? Who says so, and why? These questions, common in the young adult literature classroom, may seem naïve, but they get at the heart of the concerns that motivate educational policy on the one hand and literary approaches to fiction on the other. The introductory chapter outlines the stakes of the debates about adolescent reading and young adult fiction, taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws on reader-response theory, applied study of literacy and education, and literary analysis to argue for the importance of reading in contemporary young adult fiction.
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Notes
- 1.
In my article, “Cinderella, Marie Antoinette, and Sara: Roles and Role Models in A Little Princess,” I argue for a more nuanced understanding of the value of role modeling. In brief, it seems to me that novels depicting readers, especially, speak to their own readers about the value of reading in ways that we should pay attention to. While we cannot posit a one-to-one relationship between character and reader, such novels “nurture the narrative imagination,” expanding the opportunities to think about how reading works (Gruner 1998, 180).
- 2.
See below for a fuller discussion of both of these claims.
- 3.
This number seems only to have grown in several more recent surveys. In 2004, 33% of Scottish pupils and 29% of UK pupils overall responded that they never or hardly ever read for pleasure (UK National Literacy Trust 2006, 11). In several recent Scholastic surveys, 18–21% of 15–17-year-olds said “I do not like [reading] at all” (2010, 44; 2015, 95; 2017, 103). While quantity and ability are of course different, and reading for pleasure may be an activity divorced from ability , many studies link them. For my purposes, reports on all three issues contribute to the larger sense of “crisis ” that surrounds child and adolescent reading .
- 4.
In her recent Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century, Maryanne Wolf notes that the terms “literacy” and “reading” frequently substitute for each other; she distinguishes them as follows: “literacy refers to the attainment by an individual or a society of the full panoply of reading and writing skills. Reading refers more specifically to the multiple perceptual, cognitive, linguistic, affective, and physiological processes involved in the act of decoding and comprehending written language” (Wolf and Gottwald 2016, 2–3). In this work, I focus especially on reading, most often on reading books: books for young adults, perhaps unsurprisingly, are particularly likely to endorse book reading, and to depict book reading as an activity that will change readers’ lives. As I will go on to argue, however, we will also see other kinds of reading, and indeed, the development of a broad array of literacy skills, as essential to civic agency in the twenty-first century.
- 5.
Jacobs synthesizes earlier research in noting that adolescent literacy requires enhanced reasoning skills in addition to the decoding skills of early reading (Jacobs 2008, 11–12 and 15–16). She is also, I believe, unique in suggesting that the issues of adolescent literacy begin to manifest as early as third or fourth grade. I also find Nilsen and Donelson’s model of stages of literary appreciation helpful; they identify the teen years as a time of “finding oneself in literature” and “venturing beyond the self” (Nilsen and Donelson 2009, 11).
- 6.
- 7.
Cart (2011) has the most generous timeline of the many historians of YA literature, tracing its origins from 1868 with the publication of Ragged Dick and Little Women, but dating its contemporary manifestation from Maureen Daly’s Seventeenth Summer (1942). Others locate its origins later, with novels such as The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger 1951) and The Outsiders (Hinton 1967) (see Chapter 2).
- 8.
See Coats (2011), Cart (2011), and Trites (2000) for fuller discussions of YA literature’s origins and history, theoretical approaches to it, and its importance in the history of literature. As recently as 2011, Karen Coats noted that few critical works theorize YA fiction “as distinctive from literature for either children or adults” (Coats 2011, 317).
- 9.
In selecting texts for inclusion in this study, I have included some texts that might typically be considered “middle-grade” rather than “young adult,” including Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming and the Harry Potter series of novels. I have done so deliberately, because of their engagement with reading and their refusal to come to easy closure. I will address generic considerations more fully in the individual chapters that follow.
- 10.
My own use of the term “metafiction” tracks closely with Sanders’s. Claudia Nelson distinguishes between novels which feature “bookworms,” all of which might be said to be metafictional in that they call attention to reading, and subsets of that larger category, such as “intrusion fantasies” (one of which, A Breath of Eyre , I discuss in Chapter 3) and works about storytelling, many of which are included in this study (Nelson 2006, 223). Geoff Moss more restrictively claims that “metafiction … denies that language is invisible and prevents total absorption in or identification with a book” (Moss 1990, 14).
- 11.
Trites writes: “In a literature often about growth, it is the rare author who can resist the impulse to moralize about how people grow” (Trites 2000, 73). Here, I focus on young people’s growth as readers.
- 12.
See Reading Next (2004, 1), Heller (n.d., n.p.), Fiester (2013, 9). But see also Moore et al., who make a similar point about future literacy needs in their position statement on adolescent literacy: “Adolescents entering the adult world in the 21st century will read and write more than at any other time in human history. They will need advanced levels of literacy to perform their jobs, run their households, act as citizens, and conduct their personal lives. They will need literacy to cope with the flood of information they will find everywhere they turn. They will need literacy to feed their imaginations so they can create the world of the future. In a complex and sometimes even dangerous world, their ability to read will be crucial” (Moore et al. 1999, 99).
- 13.
See also: “American youth need strong literacy skills to succeed in school and in life. Students who do not acquire these skills find themselves at a serious disadvantage in social settings, as civil participants, and in the working world” (Reading Next 2004, 3).
- 14.
In Proust and the Squid, Wolf notes the origins of writing in clay “tokens” used to record “the number of goods bought or sold, such as sheep, goats, or bottles of wine. A lovely irony of our species’ cognitive growth is that the world of letters may have begun as an envelope for the world of numbers” (Wolf 2007, 27).
- 15.
See Resnick and Resnick (1989, 186–187), for elaborations of these nearly self-evident categories. “Useful” literacy includes anything the reader can use immediately: recipes and user guides, for example. “Informational” literacy involves reading to develop a body of knowledge. Resnick and Resnick are careful to note that these are not properties of texts themselves, but of the reader’s interaction with the text. That is, the cookbook reader who is making dinner is involved in a useful literacy transaction, while the cookbook reader who wants to gain an appreciation for how sourdough bread is made is engaged in an informational (or perhaps even a pleasurable, depending on her motives) literacy transaction. Both are, of course, essential to many kinds of employment.
- 16.
See Chapter 3 for a particularly gendered version of this argument. While some researchers may distinguish “theory of mind” from “empathy,” others use them nearly interchangeably. For my purposes in this work, their similarities—the ability to recognize another’s humanity—are more important than their differences. See Ann Jurecic for an especially thoughtful analysis of the contributions and limitations of an empathy-based literary criticism. Suzanne Keen helpfully distinguishes between empathy as “cognitive perspective taking” and “affective empathy,” a “vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect” (Keen 2007, 4, 9).
- 17.
See Lerer (2006, 632–635). One of the most instructive of his anecdotes comes from Augustine’s Confessions, in which he writes of his overwhelming sympathy for the Aeneid’s Dido—a sympathy he decries for taking his attention from God: “I learned to lament the death of Dido, who killed herself for love, while all the time, in the midst of these things, I was dying, separated from you, my God and my Life, and I shed no tears for my own plight” (Aeneid 1.13, Lerer 2006, 632). Note that for Augustine, unlike contemporary defenders of reading, such sympathy leads to sin.
- 18.
Oatley’s argument logically extends beyond fictional texts, of course, to all kinds of storytelling and storymaking, though his and my focus remains primarily on novels.
- 19.
While Scholastic’s survey is biennial, the questions and the format for reporting the responses have not remained consistent over the years. This question does not seem to have been asked in more recent surveys.
- 20.
Michelle Pauli in the Guardian did so almost immediately, repeating the more common argument that teens—and others—“read to explore and experience other lives and thoughts and situations in a safe way” (Pauli 2013).
- 21.
Perhaps the best indicators of the issues that most raise anxieties among parents and other gatekeepers are the ALA’s annual lists of most banned and challenged books.
- 22.
My students frequently enter their Children’s/YA literature class proclaiming that what’s most important is simply that children read. But many of our class discussions are given over to the “appropriateness” (their word) of one book or another for the designated age group—even if the target readers are adolescents only a few years younger than themselves.
- 23.
Failures of democracy, in this narrative, thus correlate closely with failures in reading. I treat this issue more fully in Chapter 6.
- 24.
Educational theorists dating back to the early republic debated whether public education should focus on basic work-related skills or “enrichment”—this dispute seems to be replicating that early debate (see Neem 2017, Chapter 3). Again, the argument is more complex than I can develop here; see Wong (2018) for a more thorough discussion.
- 25.
Trites suggests that it does both at the same time. See especially “the paradox of rebelling to conform,” a characteristic she finds especially in school stories, but which could be said to characterize much of YA literature more generally (Trites 2000, 34).
- 26.
See Schmid (2014): “The co-creative activity of the recipient can take on a degree and pursue a direction that is not provided in the work. Readings that fail to achieve or that even deliberately resist a reception designed in the work may well broaden the work’s meaning. However, it must be conceded that every work contains, to a greater or lesser degree of ambiguity, signs pointing to its ideal reading” (10).
- 27.
- 28.
Alexander also examines what he calls a move toward “collaboration and collectivity” in works by some YA lit authors. Such efforts lie primarily in youth-developed media rather than the collaborative reading practices I analyze in the chapters that follow.
- 29.
Literacy narratives can also be distinguished from the school stories treated in Chapter 2, which focus more on the content and purpose of their protagonists’ reading than on their acquisition of skills.
- 30.
Lynch and Ender’s comment comes in the introduction to a PMLA special issue on “Cultures of Reading”—an issue containing no articles at all on reading in children’s or young adult literature. Given that reading develops most in those early years, this seems to me a striking omission.
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Gruner, E.R. (2019). Introduction: Young Adults, Reading, and Young Adult Reading. In: Constructing the Adolescent Reader in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53924-3_1
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