Let me begin by admitting that, until a few months ago, I had little to no familiarity with the genre. It was the adaptation for the big screen of Divergent, which I accidentally watched in August on the flight that took me from Italy to New York, that sparked my curiosity towards YA dystopian narratives.

I was thus eager to dive into Brave New Teenagers, hoping it would provide me with the tools to get a better understanding, not only the hybrid nature of the YA dystopian genre, but more broadly, also of the recent flourishing of dystopian narratives in literary texts, as well as on screen. Even more than the increasing number of dystopian films and television shows, what made me realize the impact of the phenomenon was the way elements and tropes typical of the genre have been spilling into and seeping through different kinds of cultural texts. I think for example of the new chapters of the Godzilla, X-Men, and Planet of the Apes sagas, all of which came out in theaters in 2014, and portrayed far grimmer scenarios than the ones before them. A similar trend is noticeable on television, with shows such as Gotham, which aims to explore the city protected by Batman before Batman came around. Although Gotham is labeled primarily as a crime-drama television series, the representation of Gotham City as a urban dystopia (a tradition that started in the 1980s with Frank Miller’s comic book and Tim Burton’s film. See James Charles Mak, “In Search for an Urban Dystopia – Gotham City.”) reaches its climax in the show. Carissa Tuner Smiths’s essay (one of my favorites in the collection) and her brilliant reading of space-time embodiment in Incarceration, particularly reminded me of Gotham, because of the way the Arkham asylum, the island of Dr. Dulmacher, and other prison facilities are depicted in the show.
Talking about television, I find it interesting and surprising, however, that YA dystopian narratives have yet to conquer the medium’s programming. Despite the trend in the literary realm and on the big screen, and despite television itself has been abounding with dystopian narratives (I think for example of recent shows like Black Mirror, Continuum, Electric City, The Last Man on Earth, The Walking Dead), I cannot think of a single television show aimed at a young adult audience set in a dystopian world.

Returning to Brave New Teenagers, my high expectations did not set me up for disappointment. The essays it contains did not only shed light on the genre, but they also took me on a kaleidoscopic journey through theory and different methodologies. The book abounds with mindful insights and it offers a number of readings of YA dystopian texts from the past twenty years through approaches as varied as post-humanism, eco-criticism, Marxism, feminism and race theory. Furthermore, its different sections draw from disciplines and realms of knowledge as diverse as theology, urban studies, political science and philosophy.

Reading Brave New Teen Agers made me think of the YA dystopian genre as an antidote to the many cultural texts for teenagers developed around nostalgic narratives. I am referring in particular to television shows that depict the near past as a lost Golden Age, such as Freaks and Geeks, American Dreams, The Wonder Years, That 70s Show, or Happy Days. Both genres have a way of hinting at what is wrong with contemporary society, leaving us again at an intersection between entertainment, didacticism, and escapism. However, whereas nostalgic television shows idolize a comfortable past that cannot possibly be retrieved by the young viewers, YA dystopian narratives empower adolescents by putting the future in their own hands. In other words, in YA dystopias, the possibilities of a bleak future invite those who engage with the text to be active and bring about positive change in the world before it’s too late, instead than passively contemplate an inaccessible idealized past.

I was also attracted by the dichotomy between scarcity and excess (or abundance and sufficiency, as Elaine Ostry frames it on page 102) on which many of the novels discussed in Brave New Teenagers rely. It made me think of Herbert Marcuse, and the ideology of scarcity that he puts forward in both Civilization and Its Discontent and One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. In his dialectical analyses, Marcuse positioned himself as an early questioner of abundance in Western society, and among the first social theorists to focus on it, at a time when scarcity was at the center of most theoretical approaches. Although I do not feel qualified to attempt it at this time and place, it would be interesting, and certainly challenging, to venture on a Marcusian reading of YA dystopian texts.

Although I did not agree 100% with all the readings, even the ones that I did not seem to agree with, I found plausible for the most part. Furthermore, not being familiar with most of the primary texts analyzed, it would be difficult for me to engage in productive criticism. However, a specific passage of Katherine Broad’s essay on The Hunger Game trilogy raised some questions for me. I found her reading of Katniss’s romances as catalysts of the story very astute and brilliant. Despite some exceptional moments of bravery, at times I too thought she was a passive heroine. However, I think Broad’s interpretation was a bit stretched when she confronts the theme of motherhood, the treatment of which I find particularly harsh.

Broad posits that “if the upshot of overthrowing a dystopian regime is being able to settle down and have kids, then whatever happens in the rest of the country will not involve Katniss.” (125) and again that “ultimately, the final image of complacent adulthood with husband and children suggests that Katniss’s instances of rebellion are permissible for girls, not for women.” (126) But if we do not get to see (or rather, exactly because we don’t get to see it) what the country is like after the revolution, then we may very well assume this new world is one that does not know injustices and oppression (i.e. a utopia).  If that were the case, there would clearly be nothing for Katniss to rebel against. As Broad herself notes in her essay, the protagonist’s maternal desire, as well as her desire to settle down upon her return to District 12, gradually develop throughout the series, possibly because of the traumatic experiences she goes through and – despite the fears she shows in the Epilogue – because of the possibilities of a better life granted by the new (utopian?) regime. What I am getting at here, is that from Broad’s assumptions I gathered that motherhood necessarily removes all agency from a woman. I thus wonder – does a female character have to be denied any desire towards the possibility of reproduction in order to be a feminist heroine?

I just came across this fascinating article on my Facebook feed and I thought I’d share it here just in case anyone might be interested.

25+ Changes To Your Favorite Childhood Book Show How Much Society Has Changed

In Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young, Sara Day builds her argument around the idea of narrative intimacy, a kind of “narrator-reader relationship that reflects, models, and reimagines intimate interpersonal relationships through the disclosure of information and the experience of the story as a space that the narrator invites the reader to share.” (3) Accordingly, one of the outcomes of narrative intimacy is the blurring of boundaries between fictional story and real reading experience. Although she limits her analysis to literary texts, Day recognizes that “film and TV Shows, likewise, often allow for the possibility of narrative intimacy by employing voiceovers and other techniques that allow the main character to communicate thoughts and feelings to the viewer without revealing them to other characters within the fictional space of the story.” (24)

A first person voice over narration integrates what, ever since Dziga Vertov’s WE: Variant of a Manifesto, published in 1919, has been known as the “omniscient nature of the cine-eye.” Voice-overs thus allow the audience to explore the psychological interiority of a character and, by doing so, to strengthen the empathetic relationship it builds with her/him. This technique is often responsible for making us “feel like our friend is telling [us] a story,” (3) similarly to the fan of The Princess Diaries mentioned in the opening of Day’s book.

Voice over narration has been employed in a number of film and television productions aimed at young adults. Day brings up examples such as Felicity (a drama television series that ran from 1998 to 2002 on The WB), and Easy A (a 2010 teen comedy, the plot of which is loosely based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter). Television shows hold a particularly interesting position in relation to the idea of narrative intimacy proposed by Day, because the very seriality of the format has been linked to the development of parasocial interactions between viewers and characters by scholars in multiple fields. In a nutshell, parasocial relationships can be defined as:

one-sided relationships, where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other’s existence. Parasocial relationships are most common with celebrities, organizations (such as sports teams) or television stars. (Source: “Parasocial Relationships: The Nature of Celebrity Fascinations” – My apologies for employing such an unorthodox source, hopefully this is acceptable on a blog post!)

Cristel Antonia Russell and Barbara Stern have observed that

over the course of watching multiple episodes of a television series […] viewers can become actively vested in the characters whose lives they closely follow and care about, and sometimes begin to interact with them as if they were real, in a parasocial way. Thus, long-term viewing is essential to the attachment process over time, a process in which viewers develop attitudes toward the characters, get to know them, experience feelings of intimacy with them, and engage in vicarious participation in their lives […]. The process resembles the developmental progression of “real” relationships […], during which communication with the other […] and understanding of him or her increases in tandem with familiarity. (Russell and Stern, “Consumers, Characters, and Products.”, 7)

Parasocial relationships, just like narrative intimacy, are put into effect by the audience’s attempt to fill the Lamarquian “logical gap” between characters and viewers (i.e., the impossibility for viewers/readers to communicate with characters) brought into play by Day. (18) It is my understanding that, whereas the creation of a common space between the characters of a story and the audience to vicariously experience emotions is intrinsic to serial television, the employment of first person voice over narration is required for the development of narrative intimacy. I thus locate in parasocial theory the very foundations for the concept of literary intimacy brought forward by Sara Day, and I was surprised to find out that she never refers to it in her study.

While reading Reading like a Girl, several television shows for teenagers that potentially construct narrative intimacy through their protagonists’ voice overs came to mind, and I was debating whether I wanted to focus this post on My So-Called Life (1994-1995), Veronica Mars (2004-2007), Suburgatory (2011-2014), or Hart of Dixie (2011-2015). However, once I got through chapter five (“What if Someone Reads it?”) I realized Awkward., a teen-com-drama created by Lauren Iungerich that’s been airing on MTV since 2011, would be the most interesting to bring up for discussion.

The show chronicles the coming of age of Jenna Hamilton (Ashley Rickards), who starts a blog (“Invisible Girl Daily”) as a way to cope with her struggle with identity and her position as an outcast in high school. In Awkward., the audience is allowed to access the main character’s thoughts through both Jenna’s witty voice-overs and her online blogging practices – both places standing as locations of disclosure working towards the development of narrative intimacy with the audience.

The series tackles some of the same themes (all of them quite typical of young adult literature and television, such as irresponsible parenting, teen alienation, high school popularity, first, second, and third loves) as Alyson Noel’s Cruel Summer, one of the texts analyzed by Day. However, what’s more important for my analysis, is that both works examine questions of “private versus public disclosure” (176) and “bring […] private and public genres into conversation with one another in order to investigate [the protagonist’s] complicated experience of disclosure and discretion.” (174)

The audience’s privileged viewpoint on Jenna’s life is built on three levels: first, through the camera-eye we are allowed to witnesses the unfolding of the events as they take place. Second, through her voice overs, she trusts us – sometimes even more than her best friends Tamara (Jillian Rose Reed) and Ming (Jessica Lu) – with her confessions and her innermost thoughts. Third, by giving us access to her blog and her writing process, we witness the shaping of her virtual persona (i.e. an actively constructed presentation of herself).

Furthermore, Day proposes that “the female tradition of personal writing simultaneously invites opportunities for expressive release, guilt, and fictive construction.” (147) Coherently, the show often hints at the therapeutic function of personal writing (Jenna refers to her blog as her “go-to method of problem solving”). As Trevor Kelley beautifully phrased it: “Ideally the blogging experience should feel a little bit like emo yoga. […] Venting about an unrequited crush can—and should—serve as a sort of emo version of Shavasana.” (Trevor Kelley and Leslie Simmon, Everybody Hurts, 86). Thereupon, I am going to speculate that, in Awkward., the depiction of blogging as more than just online-gut-spilling, also serves a didactic function for the audience, which is encouraged to take up writing as a healing and constructive practice, especially during adolescence. Now, on this last remark, the show follows the trajectory of other works analyzed by Day: as the series progresses and Jenna advances through high school and into college, the entries on her journal become less frequent, and blogging give way to other forms of creative writing (one of the subplots in season three revolves around Jenna’s venture into the realms of fiction and poetry).

Finally, I think it’s worth to point out how the series’ producers have cleverly been employing social media to further blur the line between fiction and reality. In addition to recreating Jenna’s blog on Tumblr, the audience has been occasionally invited to reply to the (apparently) rhetorical questions posed by the protagonist through her voice-overs and blog entries. Such seeming possibilities of interaction with Jenna’s fictional world provide the audience with the illusion of bridging the logical gap. For example, when, torn between two lovers, Jenna asks herself whether she should get back with her former lover (Matty McKibben/Beau Mirchoff) or stay with her current boyfriend (Jake Rosati/Brett Davern), the hashtags #teammatty and #teamjake were superimposed on the screen, inviting the audience to voice their opinion – in other words, to give Jenna their advice – via Twitter. In addition to functioning as a form of cross-promotion for the show, these actions also undeniably foster the audience’s sense of involvement and thus develop even further the narrative intimacy between viewer and protagonist.

Due to my fascination with the intersection of literature, history and politics (and with the Age of Containment in particular) I had great expectations for Julia Mickenberg’s text. Although I am mostly satisfied by her findings, and I found her readings of the primary texts particularly insightful, I was frustrated by her occasional one-dimensional treatments of history. I will thus use this post to explain why I believe Learning from the Left can be taken as an example of both good and bad interdisciplinary work.

Mickenberg does a great job in piecing together the information she draws from her massive and multifaceted corpus of sources. The all-embracing analysis of the primary material she selected is particularly impressive. She takes into consideration an extensive repertoire of books for children that differ broadly in terms of genre, settings, stock characters, ideologies, narrative techniques, tropes, origins (national VS transnational), distribution and reception. I also particularly appreciated her close readings, most of which literally prompted me to look up the primary texts online (ever before Prof. Hintz uploaded some of them in the Dropbox).

What’s even more stunning is the way she engages with material as diverse as periodicals, interviews, and archival records. The employment of those sources allows her to enrich her analysis on multiple levels. First, she retraces the personal histories of those who worked in the field in order to persuasively show how different people were moved by different motives in their perpetuation of a leftist ideology through children’s literature. Furthermore, they enable her to connect the dots and successfully delineate the interwovenness and synergies (among authors, publishers, political organizations, educators, and librarians) that made its emergence and diffusion possible, as well as to expose the importance of the gendered nature of the apparatus.

However, much to my displeasure, I found Learning from the Left occasionally subject to oversimplification and historical inaccuracies that illustrate some of the challenges that can emerge from engaging with interdisciplinary work. I will take the first chapter and her treatment of progressivism, which I personally found quite problematic, as an example of my critique.

Let me start by saying that the very way in which she uses the term “progressive” confuses me at times – throughout the book, it is unclear when she employs it as an adjective (as in “using or interested in new or modern ideas especially in politics and education”, vid Merriam Webster http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/progressive ) and when she is addressing the actual progressive movement that emerged in the United States early in the 20^th century. When she refers to the latter, she is correct in pointing out that progressives, like Lyrical Leftists, also believed in the idea of “salvation by the child” and largely invested in programs intended to mold (especially urban) children, before they disappeared into “the anonymous mass” (as Jacob Riis put it in How the Other Half Lives). Their efforts ranged from environmental improvement programs (i.e. the construction of parks and playgrounds in heavily populated urban areas) to experimental education.

Mickenberg frames progressivism as a school of thought that

embraced what cultural historian Michael Denning has called the Popular Front “structure of feeling,” which included a commitment to challenging fascism, racism, and imperialism; to promoting democracy; and to forging international, working-class solidarity. As some readers probably already gather, progressive was often a code word for “Communist”. (10)

However, she fails to frame the context in which they operated, and to fully explain the nuances of a movement that was hardly homogeneous in its operations and ideologies. Regardless of their (apparent) antipathy for genteel society and capitalism, progressivism was hardly a leftist initiative. In fact, the term progressive eluded political ideologies, as the movement counted on individuals from across the political spectrum, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. According to New Leftist historians (such as William Williams and Gabriel Kolko), despite the large involvement of the middle-class, progressivism was indeed largely led by part of the new industrial ruling class who identified the corporation as the central institution of the system. From this perspective, public intervention on business regulation promoted by the progressive movement should not be considered a victory of the people against the power of private tycoons, but rather the beginning of the control of business over politics that eventually brought to the establishment of political capitalism. Now, one can clearly see how locating progressives in the same tradition as Lyrical Leftists, without at least mentioning its underlying contradictions, could be somehow misleading.

Moreover, Mickenberg posits that the “[the left] built upon progressive traditions- especially marked in the Settlement House Movement from the turn of the century – of celebrating the distinctive cultural contributions of the national’s immigrant groups.” (46) Such a claim represents yet another historical inaccuracy. The Settlement House Movement was composed of social workers who aimed at educating the poor by establishing settlement houses in poverty-stricken urban areas where they would also live. Settlement workers, predominantly young, white, middle-class, college-educated Protestants, hoped to relieve the poverty of their low-income neighbors by transmitting knowledge and culture, and by providing services such as daycare, education, and healthcare as well as recreational spaces (among which resourceful libraries). The Settlement House Movement emerged from the progressives’ deeply rooted beliefs in immigrant assimilation. In other words, they believed new-comers were to become Americanized by rejecting their native culture for the one of their new country, a process that did not entail only taking up new cultural mores, but also, as Robert Downling has pointed out, “the initiation […] into a democratic society increasingly consumer oriented and actuated by industrial growth.” (114) What is celebrated by Mickenberg as an early attempt to instill in children the importance of ethnic diversity reflects instead the will of progressives to assimilate immigrant children, the great majority of whom belong to the working class, to mainstream society – a goal in clear contrast with the leftist’s aims to foster independent thinking.

I will bring one more example to your attention. The nuances that characterized the progressive movement are once again ignored altogether when she points out that “the emphasis on self-directed activity among the children was characteristic of practices widely promoted by advocates of progressive or “experimental” education.” (31) Although most progressive educators agreed on the necessity of rethinking the role of educators in primary and secondary schools, different fringes of the movement were also in disagreement on the degree to which teachers should function as authoritative figures. This division went beyond the school context. I think for example of the dichotomy between the “park movement” and the “playground movement”, both of which placed a special emphasis on new generations to create for children an alternative environment to the vice-ridden city streets. Whereas the former encouraged unsupervised play, playground enthusiasts believed the presence of a trained supervisor was required on the premises, as in the lack of such control, “the playground community would degenerate into anarchy and chaos.” (Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 249)

Although these are only few among many passages in the text that I found problematic, all in all, I do not think Mickenberg’s general claims are undermined by her occasionally superficial analysis of politics and history. I attribute to the author great merits in illustrating how in the first half of the 20^th century, leftist authors employed children’s literature as a mean to provide lessons to the nation’s youth by instilling their work with social significance. She accurately decodes the (more or less explicit) messages in the primary texts she examines, messages ranging from a critique of the status quo, to the promotion of causes such as the working class struggle and racial equality. However, from Learning from the Left we also learn that stepping in multiple fields can be challenging. I understand that the Progressive Era is not Mickenberg’s main concern, but considering she invested a whole chapter tracing the origins of several elements of leftist children’s literature in the practices of the progressive movement, I believe she should have provided her readers with the proper historical contextualization, rather than granting us only pieces of information that were instrumental to her thesis. I do not mean to bash the text, nor the author, but – as our field is increasingly embracing (and encouraging us to reach out to) other disciplines (vid last week’s class discussion and readings) – I thought I’d mention these dissonances as an example of problems that can possibly be encountered while conducting interdisciplinary research and I am hoping that more potential issues will be brought up during our class discussion.

Writing in 1997, Richard Flynn draws the state of the art of our field of interest. Even though by the time the study of children literature had already become institutionalized, he denounces its persistent marginality and its reputation as “a form of academic transgression.” (144) Namely, he places emphasis on the struggle that scholars working on children literature had (and nowadays still have) to endure in order to be taken seriously.

According to Flynn, it is particularly important to investigate the concept of childhood as both a contested and elusive site, it being “a wonderfully hollow category, able to be filled up with anyone’s overflowing emotions.” (143) He thus calls for a reconfiguration of the field and a broadening of its scope to enrich both the value of the scholarship it produces and its visibility. His recipe to achieve this goal is “to draw on the finest work in the field of children’s literature by emphasizing its major theoretical concerns and bringing those concerns to bear on other literary, cultural, and social texts” (144). In other words, Flynn encourages an interdisciplinary approach that places the child, rather than a specific discipline, at the center of the discourse. He thus dismisses the dichotomy proposed by British scholar Peter Hunt – to whom he is responding with this piece – between “book people” and “child people”. He underlines how the complexity of childhood as a social and cultural construct can only be efficiently investigated through the employment of a multiplicity of perspectives.

The class readings we have been engaging with over the past few weeks point to the fact that the advices dispensed by Flynn almost twenty years ago had a positive impact on the field. I think for example of groundbreaking texts such Rachel Bernstein’s Racial Innocence (2011) and Joseph Thomas’s Playground Poetry (2007), each drawing and reaching out to disciplines outside of the literary realm, such as visual studies, performance studies, and political history. Even more so has done Kenneth Kidd in Freud in Oz (2011), by distinctively bringing into dialogue psychoanalysis and children literature. It would be interesting to find out if and how scholars working in other disciplines – e.g. cognitive science, psychology, and communication sciences –  have reciprocated this interest by reaching out to (and/or including) children’s literature in their scholarship. Furthermore, despite this (relatively) newly found interdisciplinary verve, our class discussions have left me under the impression that committing to children’s literature as one’s primary field of scholarly interest still ignites dreadful fears of inadequacy – more precisely, of not being taken seriously both within the academia and outside it. That is particularly puzzling, considering the importance attributed to the realm of childhood in the great majority of fields of study. Why is that different in the domain of literature? What puts babies (and children) in the corner – pun intended – in English Departments? Is the investigation of children culture really deemed as empty of social and practical consequences?

In his manifesto, Flynn also calls attention to the representation of children in literary works for adults. He does so by bringing up the ambivalent figure of Pearl in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which synthetizes the ambivalence that has characterized the discourse on childhood from the Romantic period up to the present-day. The tension between the conception of the child as “good seed/bad seed” (143) is one that scholars in childhood studies must embrace, for the friction between such contradictions generates sparks and ambiguities worth investigating. The broadening of the scope of our research to the representation of children in texts that are not primarily aimed at them finds me in complete agreement. Children are equally exposed to those representations, especially when it comes to media they can access freely and independently (such as television, or digital platforms). Most importantly, despite the identity of the audience – be it readership or viewership –  those cultural artifacts are also places where the concept of childhood is constructed. In other words, the way children are depicted and treated in cultural artifacts aimed at adults also determines the way in which society conceives and perceives childhood.

Flynn thus blurs the line between the binaries that have characterized the field: between adults and children; between past and contemporary texts (he very cleverly underlines that not only the understanding of historical childhood is problematic, as it needs to be screened through contemporary lens, but also that of the present); and, most importantly, he reconciles the figures of “book people” and “child people”, a compromise necessary to gain the institutional power required to “offer significant and powerful corrective to the dominant educational ideologies that threaten children’s legacy and ability to think” (145). His recommendations for the future of childhood studies remind me of the goals set by Stuart Hall for British Cultural Studies. Like Hall, Flynn believes the theoretical in need of being strongly and necessarily tied to a political and practical mission that would redeem the reputation of our work as empty of consequences.

In connection with this week’s readings, here’s a couple of pictures that were part of a controversial advertisement campaign conducted in the 1990s by the Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani for the fashion brand Benetton. Toscani has come to be well known for the shocking pictures employed to shock the viewer on social issues, and themes such as racism, homophobia, imperialism, and so forth. Some of them had become popular (and controversial) not only in Europe, but also in the US.

I was reminded of these two specific photographs because they both subvert the idea of “the loving touch of the white child” that, according to Bernstein’s reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “restores Topsy to humanity, natural Christianity, and childhood.” (45)

In addition, I see the second picture as an explicit mockery to racial prejudice, suggesting it does not belong to the innocent realm of children. This representation clearly relies on a Romantic view of childhood, as also suggested by the apparently harmless nudity and asexuality of the subjects (the gender of the children does not appear clear to me in neither of these pictures) . The embrace clearly implies complicity and mutual protection, whereas the grin on the white child is an element of the depiction that attracts me and yet leaves me puzzled. I came up with two different readings for this and I would love to hear your opinion on them, or your personal interpretations if you come with a different ones. At first I thought of it as a mockery of the kids’ appearance, as an evil grin suggesting the naughty nature of the little angel, in clear opposition to the harmlessness of the little devil-looking child. At a second glance, though, it seemed to me more like a defiant grin, a mockery to the racial prejudices of the adult world (the intended audience of the picture indeed).

By the way, you can find more of Toscani’s campaigns here http://www.repubblica.it/cultura/2014/08/08/foto/oliviero_toscani_le_campagne_pubblicitarie_pi_provocatorie-93430769/1/#1 (the website is in Italian, but the pictures are quite eloquent) and an an interview with him here http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/08/13/oliviero.toscani/index.html .