In Roberta Seelinger Trites’ work Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature, Trites conceptualizes the YA novel as a cultural artifact that has “emerged as an aspect of postmodernism” (Trites 52). In Nancy Lesko’s important sociology text, Act Your Age!: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence, she writes that “The human being of postmodernism is understood as a text, as a composition, as a bricolage, or as a performance without an essential core. The self becomes ‘subjectivity’” (17). I argue that YA Literature literalizes Lesko’s social theories of the human being of postmodernism being conceptualized as text. In YA narratives, the reliance on the textual in the form of self-writing and intertextuality and the convergence of protagonist with text features human as composition, to be both written by the self and also inscribed within available narratives. In my dissertation project, I examine the postmodern conventions within contemporary YA Literature, especially in regard to theories of textuality. Focusing on the prevalence of YA novels featuring protagonists who engage in the interpretive act of reading outside narratives while also practicing self authorship (through journaling, letter writing, etc.), I examine the contemporary coming of age story, a story made more complex in the current cultural moment according Christian Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hillary Davidson, and Patricia Snell Herzog. I argue that a central element of the coming of age story is accepting and embracing subjective truth and articulating that truth through language. This is facilitated in many cases by relying on outside texts as models or available narratives to relate to or borrow from. Using postmodern conventions and themes, these novels explore the relationship between official “Truth,” commonly steeped in repressive ideologies, and subjective “truth,” the celebration of which marks the successful coming of age within these narratives.
About the presenterShannon Kathleen Tarango
Shannon Tarango is an ABD, PhD student at the University of California, Riverside. She focuses both on American Literature 1900 - present and on Contemporary Young Adult Literature. In her dissertation, she considers the relationship between the ever-growing category of Young Adult (YA) Literature and our current cultural moment. Specifically, she explores how contemporary YA novels use the conventions of postmodernism both thematically and formally. The central questions driving her investigation are these: why is there such a prevalence of youth narratives since the 1960s that feature protagonists who engage in self-writing or who engage in the interpretation of famous and/or cultural narratives? And what does the link between postmodernism and emerging adulthood have to do with this literary phenomenon?