It was very difficult to read Rand’s work and not gush at both what she does and what I can remember about Barbie. But the most exciting thing about this chapter are Rand’s effort to continuously challenge the modes of thinking. Rand will drop a testimony and read it in a particular way , only to explore in the following paragraph that that a particular lens may be excluding other thoughts. For me, it was the intricacies surrounding approaches to testimony that were so valuable.

Rand deconstructs the multitude of Barbie stories through the almost exclusive use of adult testimonies, broken up by short acknowledgements to marketing practices. She additionally breaks down the chapter to address several issues: consumer generated meaning for Barbie and consumer resistances to perceived Barbie messages. Additionally, Rand concerns herself with almost exclusively women’s stories for what I imagine are obvious reasons.

She summarizes her chapter quite succinctly several pages in, at the end of an analysis of Carol Nicksin’s testimony, where Rand observes that “Barbie […] seemed to demand a stance, which often had to be fought for, or fought over, because more than Barbie was at stake. Taking a position on Barbie meant taking a position about other issues, or defining oneself, or defying authority” (98). She read the Barbie phenomena as one that necessitates a conversations on naturally intersecting topics. To address Barbie at all, regardless of your age, is to enter into this space.. And this is a really exciting thing to say in one sentence.

Rand notes her concerns openly in the third paragraph of the chapter as she remarks “memories, even the most vivid, are notoriously unreliable, their veracity hard, if not impossible, to test.” (94) The issues surrounding these testimonies, all by adults who are looking back on their childhoods reveals to Rand the importance of understanding the impact of perception and personal stake. These moments where she pauses to examine her approach were the most valuable to me. She writes that “anecdotes can’t be placed on a continuum from acceptance to rejection, mainstream to marginal, or straight to queer” (102). This is easily defended through Rand’s extensive collection of testimonies, and put serious pressure on how we approach such a messy primary source.

Rand quotes William Pope who points out how “Barbie turned my sister into a materialistic bimbo” has the same truth value as “Barbie loves Ken.” Barbie cannot actually do either of those things. Yet the first, unlike the second, often stands as a credible description of reality because phrases like “turned my sister into” are understood as figures of speech” (104-105). The statements that are commonly taken with a level of meaningful truth and those that get pushed aside reveal a hierarchy of interests. It is much more interest, it would seem, to hear about the tragic downfall of young women as opposed to an uncontested statement about heterosexual affection. There is perhaps some unintentional irony here, as Rand will proceed to talk almost exclusively about the queering of the Barbie experience in about 5 sentences. 6 if you count the subheading. This does lead to a general concern (which really fits into any kind of inquiry); what narratives or normative behavior are we dismissing as we address testimony?

These questions/concerns become further complicated as we reach the dyke destiny stories. This section of the chapter brought in some key questions that reoccur throughout the text. In reviewing the adult testimonials, Rand comes across a number of recollections that “wink” to Barbie as somehow a lens or catalyst towards understanding that child is somehow queer. Yet this simple assumption of a connection between a young child’s relationship or play with Barbie and their identity in adulthood gets deconstructed and challenged as she broadens the scope of her stories.

Observations Rand makes on interpretation are exciting, as she notes, by quoting Nestle, that “there is a tendency to interpret a fem’s use of and pleasure in certain styles and attributes traditionally labeled as feminine as a sign that she has uncritically bought the whole package, instead of as a sign that she has picked those particular elements and not others” (110). Just a few lines down on the page we see an observation by Rand who observes that “Fem stories get told less often, and without the dyke destiny nudge because dykes scan our childhoods with an eye toward the coming-out story” (110). There is a palpable expectation of queerness (and later sections will add race and class as the audience changes, but we don’t ever leave expectation behind) that isn’t a generalized wanting. It is a wanting that looks for rebellion, where queer narratives, by nature of their rebellious quality when discussing Barbie, establishes them as the more attractive story. (141) These connections and expectations are drawn throughout allege testimonies, regardless of the revealed identity of the speaker.

Having gone through discussions of dyke destiny stories, class associations with Barbie accessories (I am aware that this has been largely ignored by me), hegemonic marketing by Mattel (which has its own delightfully messy hands in race politics), and predominately white heterosexual ideologies, Rand reaches her conclusions. “Another indication of the extent to which people construe Barbie narratives through already extent habits of cultural narration is the striking similarity between tales designated nonfiction by their tellers and those categorized as fiction” (137). For our purposes, its pretty useful that testimonies can (but not always) fall into a narrative structure. However, how does the need for an interesting narrative and the expectation of “uniqueness” develop a normative standard for Barbies testimonies – or for testimonies in general? Do children, who still haven’t been trained to make the same form of narrative moves and conventions, have another shared structure?

However, exciting as these challenges are, none of it is to suggest that we throw out or accept less critically these testimonies. However, and more in line with the goals of the class, every single recollection, subversive moment, move to rebel that get retold in Rand’s writing lends itself to combat the creepy myth that children are simply passive consumers. These personal testimonies attribute to that reality, and come wrapped up with a concluding warning that “many dubious censorship moves are justified by raising the specter of impressionable children who merely absorb what they see” (147). Even though there is a whole book beyond this chapter, Rand does end with an affirmation of the complexity of childhood. Reading these stories might be problematic, but that is where we can find all these intricacies and complexities.

I really enjoyed reading Eric Tribuenlla’s “Between Boys: Edward Stevenson’s Left to Themselves (1891) and the Birth of Gay Children’s Literature.” This was my second (and much more in-depth) introduction into gay children’s literature. My first was (surprisingly) with Eric when he had our class read The Boy Who Cried Fabulous. Left to Themselves and The Boy Who Cried Fabulous deal with very different topics in queer studies. As Eric points out, Left to Themselves is much more focused on the building of a homosexual and homosocial relationship, whereas The Boy Who Cried Fabulous is more focused on the acceptance of childhood queerness.

Tribunella’s response focused more on “queering the canon,” as Kidd and Abate would say. One thing I kept thinking about while reading it is how far LGBT literature has come in contemporary literature. From the article, it seems  that gay children’s literature was originally more nuanced and subtle, relying heavily on the homosocial bonds and less on the actual physical/sexual relationship. For this response, I’m want to touch on some openly LGBT children and young adult books and end with a brief discussion of Adam Smith’s Grasshopper Jungle.

First, there’s this genre of picture books for the LGBT community that focus on explaining to children why their family is not heteronormative and that it is okay that theirs isn’t.

http://www.amazon.com/Tango-Makes-Three-Classic-Board/dp/1481446959

http://www.amazon.com/Mommy-Mama-Me-Lesl%C3%A9a-Newman/dp/1582462631/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1447902372&sr=1-1&keywords=two+mommies+and+me

http://www.amazon.com/ABC-A-Family-Alphabet-Book/dp/0967446813/ref=zg_bs_11381_7

As I mentioned earlier, there are picture books like The Boy Who Cried Fabulous (Book Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB0ycNKzMpU) that aim at teaching children, and adults, to accept all aspects of the child. Forgive me, I don’t’ have a copy with me so I can’t quote things specifically, but I’ll do my best. In the book, the boy thinks everything is “fabulous,” and adults begin to try and correct and “normalize” his behavior to something less flamboyant. While this text does stereotype gay children as effeminate, it does work to preach acceptance for people’s differences and to not judge them for being different than you.

Overall, there’s a lot more young literature today that is openly dealing with LGBT teenagers and their relationships: Chris Beam’s I am J; John Green and David Leviathan’s Will Grayson, Will Grayson; Maureen Johnson’s The Bermudez Triangle; and David Levithan’s Every Day. Of course, our society has come a long way since Left to Themselves was written. However, there are still texts with not openly gay characters. Andrew Smith’s Grasshopper Jungle comes to mind. (It’s a really weird/great book if you’ve never read it.)

Grasshopper Jungle focuses on the life of three teenagers in the days leading up to the “end” of the world. Austin and Robby are inseparable friends. When Austin and his girlfriend Shannon go on dates, it is always Robby who drives them places. The first sexual experience that Austin and Shannon have is in the backseat of Robby’s car on top of his clothes, and he inadvertently becomes a major participant in Austin’s first sexual encounter. The book implies the possibility of them being much more than friends when they get drunk one night, but the reader it is never truly confirmed. And even though Austin and Shannon have a makeshift relationship at the end of the book, it is Robby and Austin who spend weeks on end exploring the destroyed world alone, together.

–Kristi

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?

Contemporary Young Adult Dystopias: Brave New Teenagers employs depth and nuance in exploring the multiplicity of themes, motivations, and effects of the genre of young adult dystopias. Each of its four parts have an autonomous aesthetic, much like the one that it addresses in “Part I Freedom and Constraint,” but when read in totality have a cohesion that I’ve yet to feel in past readings. Perhaps it is my closeness to the genre, it’s value to my own academic study, or a testament to the works it brings together, but this anthology is by far a favorite of mine to date.

Operating under the lens of a scholar of digital humanities, I am particularly attracted to one chapter of this text. Kristi McDuffie’s “Technology and Models of Literacy in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction” taps into a contemporary discourse that many digital humanities scholars are conscious of in their own work. Using this chapter as a focal point, I intend on asserting some of my key takeaways from the larger text.

Kristi McDuffie positions the following thesis for her chapter:

“A common theme of this genre is that in the future, due to significant technological advances, many people have lost traditional forms of literacy like writing by hand. This fear that technology is causing illiteracy is widespread in contemporary society today, where teachers, parents, popular essayists, and others complain about the current generation’s addiction to texting and reluctance to read. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that these fears should emerge in texts aimed at young adults themselves.” (McDuffie, p. 145).

Before diving into her primary works, McDuffie takes a valuable detour into non-fiction. Fear is the major theme here and throughout the larger genre of YA dystopia. Technophobia in particular is illustrated to be a trend in non-fiction that has a mirror in YA dystopia. Discussing concepts like the cognitive effects of technology use via John Brockman’s Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future (2011), Hayles generational attention differences manifested in deep versus hyper attention of older and younger generations respectively, as well as the stupefication of youth through social media fueled selfishness and substanceless media consumption in the digital age via Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (2008) (McDuffie).

McDuffie then reads four YA dystopian novels: M.T. Anderson’s Feed, Ally Condie’s Matched, Scott Westerfield’s Uglies, and Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.

Feed is chosen for its mirroring of non-fiction fears of illiteracy driven by technology. Anderson uses the trope of ultra-futuristic extremes of technology to create a world where people’s communication occurs through implants directly housed in their brains. This sort of technology is both invasive and uncomfortable for the reader. Over exaggeration of contemporary colloquial language is used to illustrate a growing illiteracy within the pages of Feed. We read an excerpt of the novel that is cringe worthy to say the least. The technological advances made in person to person communication that allow people to be less reliant on language and speaking are an obvious commentary on the use of mobile and web based communication. This kind of fear of traditional literacy being replaced by new forms of communication is something that many scholars face. In the humanities in particular, using technology to peer review, blogging, and using social media to discuss academic issues is often criticized for dumbing down our ability at an academic caliber. This very blog post may be looked upon with distrustful eyes from more traditional scholars who do not understand the value of open commentary.

“Reading and Writing as Resistance in Matched” is a section that addresses the place of traditional literacy in a technologically advanced society. The world of Matched has outlawed these traditional forms of literacy. Here, again, we see a fear taken to an extreme in an attempt to comment on a greater question of modernizing societies. In an act of rebellion, the protagonist reads, then writes. Traditional literacy in this text is presented as a beautiful and freeing form in contrast to the controls and detriment of technology. This romantic relationship with the forms of old emerge when questions of archives and digitization arise in digital humanities. What do we do with the handwritten texts? What do we do with material once it is digitized? What is the value of handwriting in academia when we can produce directly on our multiplicity of devices? As print culture dies a slow, painful death, where will print artifacts and methodologies fit into the scheme of the future.

McDuffie’s exploration of Uglies follows a similar vein. Traditional and digital literacy is at odds with one another. The view of it is complicated. The black and white assumptions of the question are easily oversimplified and it takes a nuanced discussion and approach to truly dig deep. Moving to multiliteracies, we are faced with models of literacy that do not favor traditional or digital, but rather incorporate the two together. The agency of traditional and digital literacy is provided as the most productive approach to understanding the two and their place in society.

Finally, Little Brother by Cory Doctorow is presented as a prime source for understanding digital literacy. Digital literacy is provided as a form of agency for the protagonist of this text. In a police state driven by surveillance and monitoring, technological literacy allows the protagonist to gain a sense of control. Rather than allow the imposing technological destruction of society, the protagonist becomes an empowered resistor. Technology in this text plays both positive and negative roles, but the main theme is the ability to operate with powerful freedom in an otherwise restricted society due to the digital literacy of a young and intelligent person. Resistance is not limited, but rather it is fueled by technology in this text. This is an attitude that digital humanities scholars hold close to themselves. Technology is not threatening academia. It is empowering academics to explore quantitative, collaborative, and immersive theories and methodologies that have not been available to us before. Accessibility of primary and secondary sources is exploding as archives grow and more people come online. The sciences are no longer the only place for data to be manipulated and employed to create arguments. Digital humanities has a lot invested in the development of digital literacy. The relationship between traditional and digital literacy is something that many are continuing to flesh out. YA dystopian literature is an important part of that equation because of it’s audience and the fact that as this audience grows, what we say now will have a direct effect on the future of our institutions. For better or for worse.

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

Chapter 1’s discussion of the expectations adolescent women face intrigues me, but I question a couple of aspects of it. On page 11, she writes,

this version of adolescent womanhood has cultivated an expectation that young women may focus almost exclusively on the development and maintenance of interpersonal relationships without facing the challenges that confront young people whose race, class, and/or sexuality sets them outside of this narrow definition. Largely free from the oppression, rejection, and other trials that mark many young people’s experiences, the adolescent women presented in popular culture generally concern themselves with the friendships and romances that are understood to be the foundations of social acceptance and markers of maturation into adulthood.

This is an important point; race, poverty, and sexualities other than the most heteronormative are minimized in many of the most popular YA novels. Clearly, there are exceptions, but I question Day’s claim that representations of adolescent women in popular culture have cultivated an expectation that “young women may focus almost exclusively on the development and maintenance of interpersonal relationships.” The fact that TV teenagers never do homework or study for the SATs would seem to contribute to this expectation also. When I was a teenager, the teachers, cultural messages, and social climate I experienced did not encourage adolescent women to cultivate interpersonal relationships—with social consciousness or otherwise. All that mattered was hard work, good grades, and performance, and emotion and intimacy were frowned upon as distractions. Books and TV shows offered refuge largely as a means of vicariously experiencing life as an adolescent girl without such pressures and discouragements.

This wasn’t just an authoritarian message; what I perceived to be mainstream social culture among adolescents also discouraged disclosure of emotions and intimacy. I’m curious if others had the same experience. After all, I came of age in the late 90s when grunge and macho “alternative” rock dominated the airwaves and unisex combat boots were all the rage. Compared to the present glittery era of Katy Perry and Twilight fandom, the 90s didn’t offer the adolescent woman (or anyone) much mainstream cultural material to validate or redeem her emotions or even longings for childish prettiness unless she could cast those emotions in terms of a particular flavor of angst. But has that indeed changed in the present era? My students seem willing to open up and tell me personal details about themselves in their writing; they’ll admit all the sappy romantic books and movies they like. Pop culture seems a thousand times more encouraging of intimate relationships and acceptance of one’s own tender emotions without embarrassment than it did in my day. Yet teenagers still seem to suffer the bad rap of being surly and difficult, and some pieces I’ve read recently about the concept of “underlife” in the classroom have suggested that fear of vulnerability and rejection continues to manifest as a kind of obligatory, cynical culture of coolness and stoicism among adolescents. I’m interested if anyone has any thoughts on this; a certain conception of adolescence seems fundamental to Day’s argument and I wonder how well it holds up otherwise.

I was slightly puzzled by Chapter 5. Day discusses several novels in diary form, observing each fictional diarist’s simultaneous insistence on total privacy and awareness (and construction) of a reader other than herself. While I enjoyed the chapter, I’m not sure I agree with Day’s conclusions (that may be too strong a word). Day contends that the seeming contradiction between a diarist’s longing for privacy and awareness of a reader is resolved by the narrative intimacy made possible by “Lamarque’s ‘logical gap’ between fictional narrator and real reader” (149). The diarist risks too much rejection in disclosing her true thoughts to the people in her life and/or culture discourages her from making such disclosures, but the distance between her and the real reader’s ontological realities insulates her from any rejection or disruption precipitated by the disclosure. As the diarist matures and develops her ability to make honest disclosures to those around her, she no longer needs to write to the reader in the other dimension.*

While I agree with Day’s analysis in general, she seems to deemphasize the fact that diary novels often feature a distinct narrator and implied author. Mia Thermopolis doesn’t describe New York City tourist destinations to convey that she, Mia, understands her diary is really quite public; she describes them because Meg Cabot is the author of Mia’s diary and Cabot can weave text written from Mia’s private perspective together with audience-pleasing detail. To the extent the reader doubts that the real Mia would include such information without expectation of an audience, she can overlook the lapse because the detail is, indeed, pleasing. There are often moments in epistolary and diary novels when the (implied) author winks at the reader through the narrator’s confessions; no young adult reader really believes that the diary novel she picks up is a real person’s diary written in secret. Readers can simultaneously observe certain transparencies and suspend disbelief. In the first chapter, Day presents Seymour Chatman’s 1978 diagram of the intermediary positions between real author and real reader, and I would have liked to see her return to these terms in this discussion, if only to tell us why they don’t apply here.

*Did Day’s book (especially Chapter 6) repeatedly remind anyone else of Bastian and Atreyu communicating and even moving between their respective ontological realities in The Neverending Story? I’m sure plenty has been written on this, but it never occurred to me to interpret The Neverending Story as a metaphor for fan fiction and now it seems clear. Fantasia nearly ceases to be, and Bastian saves it by essentially entering its ontological reality; he continues to write the story, not as the original author, but from the perspective of original narratee, reimagining his engagement with the text.

Reading Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature, I couldn’t help but draw on my own experience as an avid adolescent reader during the time period Day focuses on. I read many of the books Day discusses as a preteen and teen and a lot of what she said about how these books allow for identification and intimacy rings true.

Particularly after reading her chapter on diaries, I was reminded of my own interactive journals that many of my other female friends also had. I wrote in a diary as an early middle schooler that was actually more of a fill-in-the blank book. From what I recall, each section was centered around a different theme: friendships, embarrassing moments, dreams, etc. I remember that there were lists you needed to fill in of your top-ten best friends, or worst enemies, for example. I have been searching for this diary on the internet and I can’t find it! (It had a moon on the cover and a lock.) But it seems similar to these ones:

http://www.amazon.com/Peaceable-Kingdom-Secrets-Dreams-Wishes/dp/B00HOSDC60/ref=pd_sim_21_3?ie=UTF8&dpID=61gce%2BdcIzL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR150%2C160_&refRID=1WVA9D2XC34S771FKHDS

http://www.amazon.com/Do-You-Know-Who-Are/dp/1465416498/ref=sr_1_51?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1447097174&sr=1-51

These books share a lot of the aspects of the fictional works Day describes. Like “intimate” YA novels, the notebooks imply a preoccupation with disclosure and secrecy, but they do so through including a physical lock or mirroring the style of an innocent composition book. The journals also imply that the diary is a feminine form, through their stereotypically girly imagery like flowers and butterflies—catering to a particular type of implied adolescent girl audience.

What’s interesting about these types of books is, like the fictional diaries or other “intimate narratives” Day describes, they also create an assumed audience—but in the case, the audience member is both reader and writer. These books are physically interactive—they envision the participation of an implied reader, but also help create an actual writer.

As a teen, I remember being inspired to keep a diary after reading books like The Princess Diaries and would even mimic some of Mia’s language in my own writing. So while writing in these interactive journals, I was also informed by fictional representations of diaries. In a way, then, we can see diary fiction as literacy narratives: works that portray the writing process or the development of a writerly figures. Diaries—both fictional and interactive—can thus serve as writing tools, as well as a form to explore the nature of intimacy and discourse.

Trites analysis of Margaret Mahy’s The Changeover (1984), Dangerous Spaces (1991), and Katiangata Twitch (2005) focuses on the way that Mahy depicts the complex understanding of the relationship between thought and body through her characters. Trites uses the analysis to highlight how Mahy changes the interaction between feminist thought and the female body as the larger feminist conversation on embodiment changed over the course of twenty years.

I was really excited to start reading this article because Trites seemed to be doing a feminist historical analysis. I find myself often falling back on that methodology with my own research. It provides an understanding of the text through the feminism in which it was produced as opposed to the feminism of today. The two are rarely similar. Philosophies change, and the way change is approached is usually vastly different as the decades passed. While approaching form a modern feminist analysis is still useful, the value of the text as feminist or not is much easier understood with this feminist historical analysis. And it seems that Trites wants to understand the *feminist value* of these texts, and in order to do that, she is contextualizing Mahy’s characters and ideas within the feminist philosophies during the books’ publications.

Before she begins discussing the novels, she contextualizes the larger feminist ideas on female embodiment. Then, she parallels Mahy’s text with the feminist philosophy during the years surrounding the publication of each text until she begins analyzing Katiangata Twitch. At this point, she switches her methodology to queer theory. This creates a strange imbalance, and it is one of the many things that make her argument feel underdeveloped. Don’t get me wrong, I thought some of her conclusions in this section were the most interesting, but the way she approaches the text is so fundamentally different than the rest of the article that it almost does not seem to fit. The only saving grace is the similar approaches and ideas that the two theories have. If there was more historicizing like in previous sections, I might not have found the section so problematic.

Speaking of problematic, I had a really hard time liking this article. At times, her analysis feels superficial. She does align her work in conversations with other scholars who have researched embodiment in Mahy’s texts, but she relies too heavily on summarizing their arguments and summarizing the text. It feels like the summarization gets far more page space than Trites own ideas and conclusions, which is disappointing. I was interested in what Trites had to say, and I often wanted her to develop her train of thought more. Take her analysis of Sorry touching Laura in The Changeover:

Laura’s laughing response acknowledges sexual desire as a “disease,” with her body still the object of his somewhat ominous sexuality: “Laura felt his left hand, his sinister hand, between her dress and her skin. ‘You probably won’t get a very bad attack,’ she said, nervous but enchanted” (204). She is both “nervous” and “enchanted,” Mahy implies, because sexuality is powerful, dangerous—and fun. (Mahy 142).

After describing how “Sorry preys upon Laura, ogling her breasts, demanding rather than asking for their first kiss, touching her breasts without invitation” and using a quote where Sorry’s hand is referred to as “sinister,” Trites concludes that Mahy is depicting sexuality as “fun.” I understand the powerful and the dangerous, but I feel like Trites is reading something that I am not in these sentences because she reads it as “fun.” This is the last word in a paragraph about “undermining” feminist assertions and repeated depictions of predators, I feel like Trites needs to explain where she is seeing the “fun” part of sexuality. I believe her when she says it is there, I just am not seeing it in the material that she is presenting here.

Ultimately, I think I would have enjoyed this article so much more if it had a narrower focus on one book of Mahy’s OR she developed her points further. I enjoyed what she had to say, to the point that I wanted more of it, but it just wasn’t there.

And I’m going to leave this as a question/idea for the class: I know little to nothing about New Zealand’s feminist movement, but in theory, there is a chance that philosophies trends were different in New Zealand (where the books were published and Mahy was writing). The feminist authors/philosophers Trites references are from a variety of places: Lorde is Caribbean-American; Cixous, French; Susan Bordo, American; Elizabeth Grosz, Australian. However, she does not reference any specific New Zealand feminist philosophies, and it might be that New Zealand followed the “popular” trends in feminism. I was just curious about how that might influence the text, and if anyone actually knew the answer.

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.