Abstract
This chapter focuses on the ways young adult novels set in school represent reading and readers. In novels set in school, characters depicted as readers may resist required reading but embrace what they discover on their own, resist the way they are being taught, or develop their own idiosyncratic ways of reading. Written against the backdrop of a new emphasis on standards-based learning, these texts are less focused on testing than we might have expected; rather, the novels provide a “shadow syllabus” for their implied readers, suggesting that through reading (especially reading these “syllabi”) they may develop power and agency.
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Notes
- 1.
Or maybe not. My recent attempts to trace the quotations have been fruitless, and I now believe that these particular lines may in fact have been written by a later “editor” who wrote a continuation of Austen’s unfinished novel. If so, the edition from which I extracted the text is now out of print and unavailable.
- 2.
Hughes writes, in the voice of the headmaster: “The object of all schools is not to ram Latin and Greek into boys, but to make them good English boys, good future citizens” (63). Most literary critics seem to agree; see Trites, 32; Reimer (2009, 222–224); and Rollin (2001) (where this passage is quoted).
- 3.
As noted in Chapter 1, YA literature has many origins. Its presence in the school curriculum, however, often originates in the social realism of teen novels such as The Outsiders, The Catcher in the Rye, as well, frequently appears on school reading lists and is often retrospectively classed among YA fiction. See Tribunella (2007) for a fuller discussion of that novel’s place in the history of YA literature and the high school canon.
- 4.
See the epilogue for a more extended discussion of this kind of sharing of fictional planes in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and The Tales of Beedle the Bard .
- 5.
These novels, though set in school, may not conform to the generic expectations of the school story, which almost always include, among other things, the incorporation of a new student (the protagonist) into a school community. While this is true for some of the novels I discuss, as we shall see below, it is not true of, for example, The Outsiders, The Catcher in the Rye, or King Dork.
- 6.
Eric Tribunella’s reading of The Outsiders provides the template for my argument here, though he focuses broadly on the high school curriculum rather than specifically on reading, as I do. In his article, he reminds us that despite the fact that the novel takes place primarily outside of school, “as the novel ends we learn that Ponyboy is submitting it as make-up work for his English class. Hence, the book refers to itself as the product of an instructional assignment” (Tribunella 2007, 89). Tribunella argues convincingly that the novel becomes “effectively an endorsement of American education,” and a celebration of the reader as a participant in a “common culture”—rather than, for example, a more systematic analysis of class politics (Tribunella 2007, 99). Thus Tribunella emphasizes the ways in which the novel folds its readers, like its characters, into the institutions of school and social class, despite its seemingly radical depiction of class conflict in the body of the text. Tribunella does not really discuss the implications, either, of the novel that Ponyboy reads. It seems to me that the choice of Gone with the Wind may make his case even more fully.
- 7.
As noted in the introduction, I take this term from Daniel P., and Lauren B. Resnick’s work in “Varieties of literacy,” though Luke and Freebody’s “four resources model” might term it “meaning making” (see Brenner 2012, 42 for more on the “four resources model”).
- 8.
Vicki Carrington, in her Bourdieuian reading of school literacy practices, reverses the emphasis here: “The legitimate linguistic habitus is objectified in the artifacts of school literacy instruction. Reference and textbooks, audiovisual and computer software, instructional texts, and the majority of children’s literature, objectify and represent the legitimacy of the official code. As much as they might convey and construe a liberatory ideology, these artifacts are self-limiting in that they portray the practices expected of the ideal literate citizen, and furthermore, present these practices as the consequence of literacy learning rather than as its precondition” (Carrington 2001, 277–278). While I find much of her argument compelling, my focus in this chapter is on the ways adolescents are able to evade official stories and write their own.
- 9.
- 10.
Patrick Sullivan concurs with this analysis, suggesting that the “readicide” of focusing on test-taking works against “‘deep reading’ [which] requires reflection, curiosity, humility, sustained attention, a commitment to rereading, consideration of multiple possibilities, and what the education scholar Sheridan Blau has called ‘intellectual generosity’” (Sullivan 2016). (The term “readicide” is taken from Kelly Gallagher, whose book of the same title informs my own analysis of high school reading as well.)
- 11.
This is of course a deliberately reductive view of a secondary school curriculum. It is reflective of the depiction of English classes in most YA novels, however—which may reflect their authors’ recollection of secondary school rather than current trends.
- 12.
Two decontextualized lines—“I go to seek a great beyond,” reportedly François Rabelais’s last words, and “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?” from The General in His Labyrinth—become touchstones for Miles.
- 13.
Carrington speaks to the tendency of canonical literature to become weirdly ahistorical: “The objectification of official language codes in official texts acts to create what appears to be an ahistorical edifice. It gives these codes the appearance of naturalness, permanence, and an isolation from the ongoing struggles for social power , when in fact they are the site of these very struggles and represent the prize for the triumphant, that is, power to legitimize particular possible worlds via officialization” (Carrington 2001, 278).
- 14.
These novels do not really take up contemporary standards-based education following No Child Left Behind, again probably reflecting their grounding in the authors’ own experiences rather than contemporary high schools. Nonetheless, most of the texts mentioned—or at least the authors—turn up on the sample reading lists in Ready or Not, the document that launched the Common Core , as well as on the Common Core exemplars for English Language Arts (American Diploma Project 2004, 101–130). While the sample reading lists from Ready or Not, like the novels I discuss here, contain few texts more recent than Maya Angelou’s memoir, the Common Core exemplars skew much more contemporary. They also, somewhat puzzlingly, list I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings among informational texts.
- 15.
Barbara Tannert-Smith makes a similar point, noting that “breaking into [her] head and finding the key to [her] secrets” is “precisely the process Melinda demands of her own reader” (Tannert-Smith 2010, 407).
- 16.
See Chapter 3 for a more extended discussion of empathy in this novel.
- 17.
See, e.g. Zunshine, Keen, Wolf, Oatley, as referenced in the introduction. I take up empathy as a reading strategy more fully in Chapter 3.
- 18.
See Elizabeth Long on the tradition of representing reading, even classroom reading, as solitary .
- 19.
We may recall here that Frankie Landau-Banks appreciates her first boyfriend for the “piles of paperbacks” that adorn his “messy dorm room” (Lockhart 2008, 30). The sexuality-textuality connections here are barely hidden.
- 20.
I take the term from Clive Thompson, who uses it in Smarter Than You Think, especially Chapter 3.
- 21.
Although we usually think of reading as solitary, as Elizabeth Long notes, there is also a long tradition of communal reading, from family read-alouds to today’s online fan communities, wikis, and fan fiction (phenomena far beyond the scope of this project).
- 22.
Both also involve actual written texts: in Looking for Alaska , the speech that Alaska has written and that the stripper delivers, and in The Disreputable History, the book of Basset history that Frankie deploys in her ever more elaborate pranks.
- 23.
Jonathan Stephens, among others, notes the frequent use of first-person narration in young adult fiction (Stephens 2007, 44; see also O’Quinn 2001, 55). Chris McGee elaborates on the irony of the first-person narrator in Speak—like most young adult novels, an adult-authored novel which inevitably mimics a teen voice “speaking to other teenagers about what adults would most want to hear” (McGee 2009, 173). This irony is one of many that pervades first-person texts for teens but does not, I believe, undercut the implication of agency that Melinda derives from reading and writing .
- 24.
Chris McGee resists the “empowerment narrative” in most readings of Speak, noting both that Melinda’s “awareness of power … is sophisticated and profound” and that the wit and energy of her narration belie the victim narrative so many readers find in the text. He is thus disappointed by an ending that, as he sees it, requires “finally turning to an adult,” suggesting that “everything is right once the teen comes to voice” (McGee 2009, 182, 184). By focusing on reading rather than speaking, I suggest instead that Anderson gives Melinda the authority in this passage as elsewhere in the novel: she reads and writes her story with her peers first, dictating the terms by which she will speak to her teacher—and to her reader. I think it is thus significant that she does not tell Mr. Freeman about it in the body of the novel.
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Gruner, E.R. (2019). Reading in School. 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_2
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