Abstract
This chapter continues the exploration of power and agency by focusing specifically on reading and citizenship. In a variety of disparate works—from historical fiction to dystopian literature, high fantasy to contemporary fantasy—literacy is central to political agency. These novels reflect contemporary anxieties about surveillance, totalitarianism, racial oppression, and other forms of civic disempowerment. The stakes of adolescent literacy are high, these novels suggest, because it is so critical to a particular kind of political engagement: both critically aware and empathic. While reading becomes part of a system of resistance to oppression, not all YA authors are equally sanguine about its potential: empathy, critical analysis, or political awareness may and often do fail, singly or together. Reading is the necessary but not sufficient precondition, these novels suggest, for an engaged citizenry.
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Notes
- 1.
Wolf’s argument, articulated in Reader, Come Home, is perhaps only the latest in a series of arguments and assertions linking reading and democratic practice. I work through several others in this line of thought below.
- 2.
Pullman’s use of “functional ” here is distinguished from, for example, Resnick and Resnick’s use of the term, which focuses on information gleaned from the text rather than the text’s value for reading instruction (Resnick and Resnick 1989, 179).
- 3.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2009 TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” similarly focuses on authoritarian readings or unitary interpretations of events.
- 4.
It may also suggest that, like My Pet Goat, the law is not, in fact, readable. Laws, like some educational reading materials, are understandably designed for “scanning” rather than engagement. Lissa Paul discusses this kind of reading in “The Naked Truth About Being Literate.”
- 5.
Neem quotes Rush’s A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools, published in 1786. I mention American political theory explicitly here because the history of public education in the USA is directly associated with the development of citizenship in the early Republic, making the literacy/citizenship link explicit in ways that are less apparent in nations with a more complex educational and political history. The US context, of course, owes a great deal to European Enlightenment theorists and was not without its own conflicts.
- 6.
These claims, of course, stand in for many others made over the years. See Introduction.
- 7.
Chapter 4 takes up race and reading more fully.
- 8.
Although I connect these novels to NCLB and the testing regime that it arises from and reinforces, only two of the novels treated in this chapter represent testing, even obliquely (Princess Academy and Long Division). The bill’s importance lies in its justifications as much as its effects.
- 9.
See Megan Isaac, “Re-animating Democracy in the World of Fantasy,” 1–2, and Daniel Baker: “In the West, the vast majority of fantasy … have been reflections, if not products, of conservative politics” (Baker 2012, 438). For an alternative view, see McKinley Valentine’s blog post, “Is the Fantasy Genre Fundamentally Conservative?”
- 10.
Frederic Jameson may be the most relevant critic here—he writes in The Political Unconscious, for example, on fantasy’s relationship to utopian thinking. See also Baker (2012).
- 11.
See Coats (2006) for Fly by Night; I base my claim about Bitterblue and Princess Academy primarily on the presence of an absolute monarchy as well as widespread illiteracy.
- 12.
In “Bewildering Education,” Nathan Snaza notes the ways in which humanity is figured as both origin and telos of education for philosophers and theorists from Plato to the New London Group, Rousseau to Freire. While his focus is on the more capacious “education,” context makes it clear that literacy is the largest component of this education.
- 13.
Although in the medieval period and through to at least the eighteenth century women and girls were far less likely to be literate than men and boys (Fischer 2003, 279), in those places with near-universal literacy late twentieth and early twenty-first century, they are far more associated with reading in general and pleasure reading in particular. See Chapter 3 on gender and reading.
- 14.
See Eldred and Mortensen’s argument regarding “Pygmalion.”
- 15.
The novel suggests a situation much like the TV reality show “The Bachelor,” in which a group of girls is gathered from which one will be chosen as the prince’s bride. The show debuted three years before the novel was published.
- 16.
The novel itself recalls children’s primers by ordering the chapters alphabetically and naming them as if in primer fashion: “A is for …,” “B is for…,” etc.
- 17.
Of course, as we saw in Chapter 5, they often do know how to read—but may eschew interpretation.
- 18.
Although Eagleton argues that reading’s solitary nature militates against collective action (Eagleton 1983, 222), Steven Fischer nonetheless traces the clear route from the wider availability of print texts, and active reading of them, to the political movements that transformed Europe from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. See also Alberto Manguel’s claim that for most literate societies, “reading is at the beginning of the social contract” (Manguel 1996, 7).
- 19.
See Isaac (2016, 1 and 8, especially).
- 20.
See also the discussion of reading in the Harry Potter series in the introduction.
- 21.
The genre of The Book Thief is hard to determine. In many ways a straightforward historical novel, it is narrated by Death, whose occasional intrusions into the text make it seem more like a work of magical realism. I have settled on “metafiction,” following Joe Sutliff Sanders, whose work on Miéville and Zusak I have found immensely helpful.
- 22.
Liesel’s books (other than Mein Kampf, The Complete Duden Dictionary and Thesaurus, and, perhaps, The Book Thief) do not exist in the world of the reader, though a quick Google search suggests that young readers—and, no doubt, others—need to verify this.
- 23.
See Chapter 4 for more on Long Division.
- 24.
See Doughty (2013) (1–8) for a précis of argument.
- 25.
Laymon’s novel owes a debt to Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), a time-travel novel that takes a contemporary African-American woman back in time to the first part of the nineteenth century. Kenneth Kidd, following Kate Capshaw Smith, cites Kindred as one of a handful of important African-American novels that use time-travel to confront historical trauma (Kidd 2005, 133).
- 26.
Although the Scholastic Corporation publishes their “Kids and Family Reading Report” biennially, these questions have not recurred since 2010. The International Reading Association’s (2012) Position statement defines adolescent literacy as “the ability to read, write, understand and interpret, and discuss, multiple texts across multiple contexts” (2).
- 27.
Sanders claims, for example, that “literature that encourages children to think for themselves and argue with authority comes to be identified as leftist” (Sanders 2009b, 295), and that Un Lun Dun , in particular, “reveals a model for children’s metafiction that, whatever its limited potential for subversion, encourages critical reading” (Sanders 2009a, 355).
- 28.
To prevent confusion between the novel Un Lun Dun and the prophetic Book within it, the latter is always capitalized here, as in the previous chapter.
- 29.
Deszcz-Tryhubczak claims that “in radical fantasy for young audiences, juvenile characters participate in abolishing the existing power structures and contribute to the formation of new networks of social and political relations. These revisionary practices occur in the context of the young protagonists’ inner maturation, a typical interest in texts for children, but do not culminate in the integration of young people into the power structure of a given society. Rather, young characters consciously participate in collective efforts to overcome oppression” (Deszcz-Tryhubczak 2013, 141). These fantasies, then, are distinguished from the YA literature Trites analyzes by failing to depict the protagonists’ reintegration into the status quo.
- 30.
One important revision Anderson made after 9/11/2001 was to change the “terrorist” of his early draft to the “hacker” of the published novel. Another was to delete references to “unexplained violence in the Middle East” (Schwebel 2014, 205).
- 31.
- 32.
The book-burning here, of course, recalls that of Nazi Germany, represented in The Book Thief, as well as the destruction of reading materials in Fly by Night, Bitterblue, and Un Lun Dun.
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Gruner, E.R. (2019). Reading, Resistance, and Political Agency. 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_6
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