Constructing the Adolescent Reader in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction

Elisabeth Rose Gruner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781137539236
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137539243
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book examines the way young adult readers are constructed in a variety of contemporary young adult fictions, arguing that contemporary young adult novels depict readers as agents. Reading, these novels suggest, is neither an unalloyed good nor a dangerous ploy, but rather an essential, occasionally fraught, by turns escapist and instrumental, deeply pleasurable, and highly contentious activity that has value far beyond the classroom skills or the specific content it conveys. After an introductory chapter that examines the state of reading and young adult fiction today, the book examines novels that depict reading in school, gendered and racialized reading, reading magical and religious books, and reading as a means to developing civic agency. These examinations reveal that books for teens depict teen readers as doers, and suggest that their ability to read deeply, critically, and communally is crucial to the development of adolescent agency.

© The Author(s) 2019

Elisabeth Rose GrunerConstructing the Adolescent Reader in Contemporary Young Adult FictionCritical Approaches to Children's Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53924-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Young Adults, Reading, and Young Adult Reading

Elisabeth Rose Gruner¹

(1)

Richmond, VA, USA

Elisabeth Rose Gruner

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

This book begins in my classrooms, in three specific, ongoing, and related student concerns about teen readers and their reading. First, confronted with young adult literature that they deem “bad”—by which they usually mean of poor literary quality—college students often defend it for their imagined child and adolescent readers, on the grounds that “at least they’re reading.” I’ve heard this defense offered up for books as disparate as the Baby-Sitters Club, the Twilight Saga, and the Harry Potter series, all of which seemed to be subject to professorial disapproval. The students are afraid—or even sure—that the books they are championing are too popular to be literary, but they value them nonetheless. Their baseline assumption that all reading is good, however, quickly runs up against its own limits and the second concern. When confronted with literature they deem “bad”—in this case usually for controversial or challenging content rather than literary quality—those same students may challenge its “appropriateness” and argue for restricting its readership. Books as disparate as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (race), Weetzie Bat (sex/sexuality), and The Giver (death/eugenics), among others, have raised these challenges over the years, and I’m sure my colleagues can name many others. Is reading an unalloyed good, then, as the first comment suggests, or is it not? This seemingly naïve question has proved, in my classrooms at least, one of the most difficult to answer.

The third concern is closely related to the second. Certain characters, students often find, are either good or poor role models for the readers they imagine encountering them. A book’s appropriateness for young readers, then, might be determined not simply by a specific kind of content, but by the presence or absence of positive role models within the text. Students in my fairy-tale classes, for example, frequently end up debating whether or not to continue reading “Cinderella” to children, given the perceived antifeminist qualities of its heroine. Readers of the Twilight saga similarly debate Bella Swan’s status as a role model, given how passively she accepts her vampire lover’s rules for her behavior. Role model criticism, while rarely practiced by professionals, still has great currency in the classroom, if only because it is so often the first move of a beginner critic.¹

In thinking about these questions and the relationships between them, I too began to look for role models—specifically, of readers. If reading is as important as we think it is, surely writers are finding a way to signal that importance. Who is reading in the books my students were reading? Who are the imagined readers for these books? And what kind of reading are they modeling for their readers? That search led to this book. What I found is that contemporary YA novels depict reading as neither an unalloyed good nor a dangerous ploy, but rather an essential, occasionally fraught, by turns escapist and instrumental, deeply pleasurable and highly contentious activity that has value far beyond the classroom skills or the specific content it conveys. As I will argue, books for teens depict teen readers as doers and suggest that their ability to read deeply, critically , and communally is crucial to the development of adolescent agency.

In the rest of this introduction, I focus first on the relevance of this claim: why does it matter what is happening in young adult fiction ? I next focus more closely on the claim itself, clarifying terms that are often used interchangeably and exploring the implications of various approaches to reading. I then outline my interpretive methods, after which I provide a brief map of the book’s organization. At a time when YA fiction’s popularity seems to be ever-increasing despite widespread anxiety about reading’s diminishing importance,² it seems critical to be clear-eyed about what reading does, why it is valuable, and how to promote it in a rising generation. This book is my contribution to that effort.

Why YA?

Why focus on teen readers and YA literature? For several interrelated reasons. First, as my students have intuited with their first concern, there is a widespread language of crisis around teen reading. Starting in the early 2000s, the National Endowment for the Arts published a series of reports on the status of reading in the USA that raised concerns about both the amount and quality of teen reading that continue to this day. In 2007, NEA Chair Dana Gioia introduced the second of these reports, “To Read or Not to Read,” with the dire news that “Although there has been measurable progress in recent years in reading ability at the elementary school level, all progress appears to halt as children enter their teenage years” (“To Read” 2007, 5). Not only reading ability , but reading quantity also seemed to have fallen in the early twenty-first century (see, e.g., the reports on “Kids & Family Reading” issued roughly biennially by the Scholastic Corporation since 2006). Such findings date back at least to the end of the twentieth century: the National Education Association reports, for example, that “between 1984 and 1996 …the percentage of 12th grade students reporting that they ‘never’ or ‘hardly ever’ read for fun increased from 9 percent to 16 percent” (“Reading at Risk” 2004).³

While the overwhelming evidence of these reports suggested a widespread crisis , not all analysts agreed. In 2011, Hannah Withers and Lauren Ross claimed that “Worldwide, young adults are the most literate demographic” (Withers and Ross 2011). Going on to cite “a 2008 UNESCO report of literacy rates in 2000,” they write: “96.8 percent of young adults in North America, ages 15–24, are literate and in the world, 87.6 percent of the same age group (959 million kids) can read (worldwide, only 82.4 percent of adults—people older than fifteen—are literate)” (Withers and Ross 2011). And while the National Endowment for the Arts proclaimed a crisis in reports from 2004 to 2007, their 2009 report was optimistically titled “Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy.” In this report, chairman Dana Gioia announced that “After decades of declining trends, there has been a decisive and unambiguous increase among virtually every group measured in this comprehensive national survey” (“Reading on the Rise” 2009, preface).

But bad news travels further, faster, than good news, and my students—like many of us—are more attuned to the story of decline. Furthermore, a closer look at the data reveals that ability and amount, quality and quantity , are so frequently confused in the reports that it is hard, indeed, for a non-specialist to determine what the status of teen reading is at any given time. What is clear, however, is that people looking for bad news about reading often find it in the teen years, when reading becomes a complex set of interrelated skills. If the first stage of reading is decoding (“learning to read”) and the second, beginning in about third grade or at about age eight, is functional literacy (“reading to learn”), adolescent literacy⁴ encompasses a wide variety of skills, including “analysis, synthesis, organization, and evaluation,” (Jacobs 2008, 15, quoting NCTE 2006, 5), or “engaging with complex ideas and information through interaction with written documents” and “using texts as vehicles for learning, critiquing, and extrapolating from extant knowledge” (Ippolito et al. 2008, 1–2).⁵ Adolescence, in other words, is where children’s reading branches out into a range of opportunities and meanings—or, as the crisis narrative suggests, fails to do so. As such, it focuses us on the importance and meaning of reading itself.

Second, my focus on you...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Young Adults, Reading, and Young Adult Reading
• 2. Reading in School
• 3. Misreading the Classics: Gender, Genre, and Agency in YA Romance
• 4. “Dreaming Themselves into Existence”: Reading and Race
• 5.  Magic, Prophetic, and Sacred Books: Making Communities of Readers
• 6. Reading, Resistance, and Political Agency
• 7. Epilogue: Reading Reading in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
• Back Matter