Course details

Name: ENGL - 305

Title: YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

Section: 01

Semester: Summer - 2013

Credits: 3

Description:
Students will read a broad representation of Young Adult (YA) texts and concomitant critical essays. This course will explore the emergence of Young Adult Literature (YAL) as a genre that includes established classics as well as contemporary works. Students will examine the historical and cultural contexts surrounding the genre’s development; discuss these works through multiple lenses; study relevant criticism; apply literary theory to the texts to explore portrayals of adolescence as sociocultural constructs; and examine how the literature of and about young adulthood reflects, responds to or reacts against those paradigms. Students will explore the issues surrounding what youths read, the books taught in our nation’s schools, the concepts these texts espouse to their intended audiences and what such works reveal about the sociocultural contexts within which they were produced.
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One of our course’s goals will be to understand and define what components make for a “valuable” piece of YA literature. We will be metacritical in our analyses of these texts, and evaluate them with the highest standards in mind. This course will explore the history of, characteristics of, benefits of, and problems surrounding this ambiguously defined genre. Many experts disagree about how to define YAL and how to distinguish it from children’s and adult literature. This course provides a forum for such serious inquiry as:
How do we define the adolescent, and how do our definitions of young people (what we believe them to be or what we believe they should become) affect the literature we write for them?
Who defines the genre (scholars, teachers, publishers, readers?) and what is at stake in the various definitions? For example, some scholars claim that adolescent literature as a genre—and even the use of the terms adolescent or teenager to refer to a distinctly separate stage of life—is a recent invention tied to the development of contemporary capitalism and the construction of young people as consumers.
If this is the case, then is adolescent literature necessarily a postmodern form? In its mass-marketed forms it is at times quite conventional and formulaic, but the better works of YAL are often sites of experimentation with subject matter and literary form that blur and test borders between genres.
What texts are the young people in our communities currently reading?
Which texts do teachers, parents and librarians, choose for them and which texts do they choose for themselves?
Can we identify books that are written “for” and “to” young adults, and is this a literary distinction worth making?
What tools can we use to better understand these texts, their benefits, their drawbacks, and their influence?
How, when, and why should these texts be taught to young people?
I hope to identify and discuss two major strands of YA literature, as well, a Romantic and Realistic strain. Each of these proceeds from the concepts of growth and power as described by Roberta Seelinger Trites in her article “Disturbing the Universe.”
Finally, the idea that any YA book is for “everyone” is a fallacy. More particularly, we will be engaging in an analysis of these books in light of the different ways boys and girls read, along with paying attention to the nefarious concept of what is “age-appropriate.”

Last updated on 2013-02-26 By Nicosia James (nicosiaj)

Schedule: Monday,Tuesday,Wednesday From 10:30 am To 12:45 pm

Graduation requirements:

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• Other American (TE 1d)
• Women and Gender Studies (3c)
• Class Issues (3d)

Teaching Faculty: Nicosia James (nicosiaj)

Is course canceled: No