As I change strategies to read straight through one book at a time instead of juggling 5 or 6, I'm also recommitting to reading through the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Disrupting Whiteness core reading list for an introduction to the problem of whiteness in librarianship and returning to the question of the state of young adult literary criticism in recent years.
For the latter, to create my own bibliography, I ran four searches in two different academic databases for articles on literary theory and young adult literature from 2010 through this year. I selected 68 titles that include articles from 40 academic journals, chapters from six books, and two doctoral dissertations. Am I actually going to read all this? I plan to, but I may run out of steam or get attracted by something shiny. All this is driven (A) by an improbably dream that I can make a significant contribution to the fields of librarianship and young adult literature and (B) by the pleasure I take in studying and, perhaps to an even greater degree, the pleasure I take in planning to study these subjects. Why drop these here? To be blunt, I have nothing better to report at this point, and I want to announce something, even if it is only an intention to report future findings. If you enjoy bibliographies as much as I do, read on.
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One aspect of the final film in the trilogy, Ong Bak 3, to which I keep returning is the relationship between classical Thai dancing, prayer, healing, and martial arts. Pim's dance in front of the temple while Tien is healing from the brutal torture he received from Lord Rajasena's men moves me tremendously. Every position, every motion is so precise. Pim invests herself so wholly in the dance. I can feel the dance-as-prayer and measure its effectiveness, its genuineness, its heartfelt urgency by the technical perfection of the performance.
What does this have to do with anything? I feel a need to unravel the problem of the function of art as a prerequisite to justifying my personal approach to YA literature. My heart belongs to Oscar Wilde and his aestheticism, his belief in art for its own sake, his dismissal of utilitarian concerns. But I recognize that this, and other similarly Decadent approaches, comes from a place of privilege and comfort not experienced by vast numbers of people. It is a white male thing. Or is it? My one-year-old loves "Thomas and Friends," a toy model-based television series about living trains who strive to be useful for a rich capitalist on a British island. Something never sat quite right with me about the series, despite its narration by favorite comedian George Carlin. Imagine my surprise, or don't, when a Google search for "Thomas and Friends Marxist critique" came back with several hits: Slate's "Thomas the Imperialist Tank Engine" from 2011, The Guardian's "Thomas the Tank Engine had to shut the hell up to save children everywhere" from 2014, and the New Yorker's "The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of 'Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends'" for instance. Sir Topham Hat as robber baron teaches trains and children that they must be "really useful engines" to have any worth at all. Since the barrage of criticism, the show has apparently been "shunted down the left track," angering conservatives with its "Marxist undertones." This revelation dovetails with the rabbit hole into which I've recently dived concerning pure vs. applied literary criticism and young adult literature.
There is a delicious irony in using Marxist criticism (an applied criticism) to point out the death of play in literary exploration. Play is the distinguishing element between the two approaches to literature, I think. Applied criticism seeks to establish that a work is "good for something," that it serves a purpose. Articles on how to use YA literature for this or that fall into this category: awakening empathy or fighting patriarchy as well as more traditional pedagogical concerns. Marxists don't decry the concept of being "really useful," after all. They only demand that one be useful (or at the very least, not harmful) to the right people: in this case, the workers. The other two critical theories Randy Ribay suggests we teach high school kids--feminism and postcolonialism--similarly demand that one be useful to women and indigenous peoples. There is nothing wrong with this: public education has multiple purposes--among them, to create good citizens, and good citizens care about equity and justice. Toward a Plan to Take Lit Crit, YA Lit (& Teens) Seriously, with some autobiographical extrania3/13/2021 Notes toward a new project
OK. There's a new bug in my brain. There's a new stumbling block. I'm obsessing a bit on having lost A.S. King as a Twitter follower. We had gone back and forth a bit about the need for serious critical treatment of YA literature--like (in my head) examining YA fiction through the lenses of not only pedagogy (what is its educational value? how do I best teach YA lit?) and politics (Marxist, feminist, & postcolonial theories), but psychoanalytical, deconstructionist, and postmodernist theory. I had brainstormed a grand project investigating the meanings of surrealism, the connection between surrealism and adolescence, and King's surrealist novels. However, I blew it. I said something offensive or was just plain irrelevant and uninteresting on Twitter, or she didn't like the four-star review I gave Still Life with Tornado (which I may change, just because on rereading it for a paper, it gets better and better), and she left, just before her birthday. Or maybe it was just time for her to cut back on the number of people she was following, and I didn't make the cut. I don't know. All I know is three things: (1) That I'm bored with YA lit crit and want to inject something new into it, (2) I have difficulty restraining impulses to say things on social media (was it my comments about my past behavior with women that I regret, or the somewhat mean things I said about Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl, or ...?), and (3) I have a tendency to get really excited about connections and overstep boundaries. Anyway, she no longer follows me. Regardless, she seems like a stellar human being, and she's been through some rough stuff and come through the other side. I admire her, and my interest in her writing continues. Consider this a list of works to examine as a preliminary for a series of articles, and please suggest more if you know of anything, especially anything more recent: |
AuthorJeffrey Babbitt, MLIS, is a graduate of the School of Library and Information Science at Wayne State University who is pursuing a career as a librarian in Michigan. Subject Headings
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June 2021
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