“We
tell ourselves stories in order to live,” opines Joan Didion in the overquoted
and often misinterpreted opening to her essay “The White Album.” But that adage
has struck a chord with countless readers in part because it artfully expresses
why stories matter—they help us understand ourselves and each other. Susan L.
Groenke and Lisa Scherff describe this in Teaching
YA Lit through Differentiated Instruction as “Reader Response Theory,” more
specifically, "interaction, or transaction--a 'two-way process', between
the reader and the text through which meaning occurs."
Richard Beach
elaborates in "A Teacher's Introduction to Reader Response Themes" that
Reader Response Theory encompasses a variety of theories. The text can be read
as a Rorshach Test for readers, given to the “New Critics” thought that gives
finality to the text itself, or even studied through its relationship with the
reader, outside of social and cultural context. But with each instance, the
text and the reader have a vibrant relationship, conducted through some
combination of the educator, the reader and the text itself, which
Often I find
myself defending humanities studies, literature in particular, as something of
value in the classroom. Isn’t fiction a luxury? Isn’t literature some escapist
way to ignore reality? Why waste our time reading something someone made up
when there is so much to be addressed in the “real world?” Stigmatized even
more so are books classified as “Young Adult” or “YA” literature. Why would
anyone teach adolescents, on the path to adulthood, with books targeted at
children? Adults who read YA often justify their passion as “a guilty
pleasure,” lest we judge them for reading at an intellectually inferior level
to those of us who read
Infinite Jest
with two bookmarks. There may be no more damning dismissal of an acclaimed work
of literature than to brush it off as a “children’s book,” the term Flannery
O’Connor famously used to shoot down
To Kill
a Mockingbird.
Surely great
writers like O’Connor would not approve of teaching anything classified as “YA”
in a high school classroom, would they?
If
not, it would be their students’ loss. Latching on to the idea that only dense
and academic language can heed profundity is the stodgy view that has impeded
the progress of great writing, whether the simplicity of Hemingway’s sentences,
Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness or the acceptance of the graphic novel as
literature. English teachers who turn their noses up at the entire YA genre may
have forgotten that several of today’s canon books—Mockingbird, The Catcher in
the Rye and The Great Gatsby
among them—were written off as lowbrow writing upon their first printings. When
Groenke and Scherff argue that YA as a genre deserves thorough critical
analysis, they are not offering a radical position but grasping the shifting
state of the canon.
Groenke
and Scherff go on to note that teaching literature, realistic fiction in
particular, is a therapeutic source for students. Works as varied as Walter
Dean Myers’ Monster, which focuses on
the murder trial of a black teenager in New York City to Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, in
which an alienated teen confronts sexual abuse instances from his childhood,
provide teens with various means of therapy, via relating to the characters’
turmoil and therefore understanding and confronting corresponding turmoil in
their own lives. Often the characters’ choices can empower students with a
sense of optimism they could not have learned from their own reality. In "Reading,
Writing and Thinking About Multicultural Literacy in Culturally Diverse
Classrooms," found in Claire Booth Olson’s The Reading/Writing Connection: Strategies for Teaching and Learning in
the Secondary Classroom, the author articulates the importance that
multicultural texts can have in empowering multicultural students. And if we
are to empower these students into being not just multiculturalists but
antiracists, modern YA may be best suited for the curriculum. Groenke and Scherff explain that teaching classic
multicultural texts, such as Things Fall
Apart and Invisible Man, can
often inadvertently mislead the students into to believing that racism is a
thing of the past, having been solved since those books’ publication. There can
be no such mistake with texts like Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian or the
aforementioned Monster.
Elsewhere,
by “normalizing” a character’s situation, YA can assure teens that something
they might consider abnormal is nothing to stigmatize. In David Levithan’s
charming Boy Meets Boy, two
characters enjoy the most conventional elements of a high school
relationship—yearning, anxiety and deliriousness among them—with the separating
factor being that the lovers are gay. Less sensitive writers would have made
the characters’ gayness a defining factor in the plot, but by normalizing it
Levithan gives gay readers a sense of acceptance they might be missing
elsewhere.
“When
I teach David Levithan's debut novel Boy
Meets Boy, students find it humorous and interesting (in that voyeuristic
'that's kinda weird' way),” writes Willam P. Banks in "Literacy,
Sexuality, and the Value(s) of Queer Young Adult Literatures." “Yet they
are also quick to say, 'But this book is too unrealistic! That would never
happen!' In presenting a "modern fairytale,' Levithan disrupts mythical
constructions that continue to pervade American culture, particularly myths
about gender, sexuality, and religion, and creates a space in a critical
pedagogy for reenvisioning the options before us."
Theodore
Roosevelt, who was known to read a book a day and enjoy the YA-equivalent texts
of his time (Grahame, Kipling, Stevenson, Twain and Pyle among them), “Now and
then I am asked as to ‘what books a statesman should read,’ and my answer is,
poetry and novels – including short stories under the head of novels. I don’t
mean that he should read only novels and modern poetry. If he cannot also enjoy
the Hebrew prophets and the Greek dramatists, he should be sorry. He ought to
read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and
philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any
fiction ever written.”
The
comparison here—that books on government and science can live up to the thrills
provided by novels and poetry—perhaps best sums up why YA should be taught in
classrooms. When we read fiction, with the open-mindedness of a YA reader, we
learn to understand ourselves and our surroundings, and therefore empower
ourselves to mold those surroundings with vigor and optimism, sometimes to the
effect of a being as consequential as Roosevelt himself.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexie, Sherman. The
Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian. New York: Little, Brown, 2007.
Print.
Banks, William P. "Literacy, Sexuality, and the
Value(s) of Queer Young Adult Literatures." English Journal (2009): 33-36.
Beach, Richard. “A Teacher's Introduction to Reader-Response
Theories. NCTE Teacher's Introduction Series. “National Council of Teachers of
English, 1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, IL 61801-1096 (Stock No. 50187-0015,
$9.95 members; $12.95 non-members)., 1993.
Chbosky, Stephen. The
Perks of Being a Wallflower. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012. Print
Didion, Joan. The
White Album. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979. Print.
Eby, Margaret. South
Toward Home: Travels in Southern Literature. New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2015. Print.
Groenke, Susan L., and Lisa Scherff. Teaching YA Lit through Differentiated Instruction. Urbana, IL:
NCTE, National Council of Teachers of English, 2010. Print.
Levithan, David. Boy
Meets Boy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2005. Print.
Morris, Edmund. Theodore
Rex. New York: Random House, 2010. Print.
Myers, Walter
Dean. Monster. New York: Ernst Klett
Sprachen, 2003. Print.
Olson, Carol Booth. The
Reading/Writing Connection: Strategies for Teaching and Learning in the
Secondary Classroom. Allyn & Bacon, 2007. Print.
