scholarly journals "I Have a Kind of Power I Never Knew I Possessed": Surveillance, Agency, and the Possibility of Resistance in YA Dystopian Fiction

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean P. Connors
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Power Systems ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Hunger Games ◽  
Dystopian Fiction ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Teachers And Students

Drawing on Foucault’s examination of the gaze as a disciplinary mechanism, and de Certeau’s discussion of how people use tactics to resist oppressive power systems, this article advocates reading the gaze in young adult dystopian fiction. To illustrate the complex readings that doing so makes possible, the author examines three young adult dystopias—M. T. Anderson’s Feed, Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy, and Corey Doctorow’s Little Brother—to demonstrate how they depict adolescents as having varying degrees of agency to resist the gaze. To conclude, the author discusses the implications for teachers and students of reading the gaze in young adult literature.

Beyond the Blockbusters

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Hunger Games ◽  
Limited Perspective ◽  
The Many

While the critical and popular attention afforded to twenty-first century young adult literature has exponentially increased in recent years, the texts selected for discussion in both classrooms and scholarship has remained static and small. Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Fault in Our Stars, and The Hate U Give dominate conversations among scholars and critics—but they are far from the only texts in need of analysis. Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction offers a necessary remedy to this limited perspective by bringing together a series of essays about the many subgenres, themes, and character types that have been overlooked and under-discussed until now. The collection tackles a diverse range of subjects—modern updates to the marriage plot; fairy tale retellings in dystopian settings; stories of extrajudicial police killings and racial justice—but is united by a commitment to exploring the large-scale generic and theoretical structures at work in each set of texts. As a collection, Beyond the Blockbusters is an exciting glimpse of a field that continues to grow and change even as it explodes with popularity, and would make an excellent addition to the library of any scholar, instructor, or reader of young adult literature.

Imagining Dystopian Futures in Young Adult Fiction

2019 ◽  
pp. 117-132
Author(s):  
Lizzie Seal ◽  
Maggie O’Neill
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Hunger Games ◽  
Dystopian Fiction ◽  
The Hunger Games

This chapter discusses how it is notable that ‘speculative fiction’ – fiction that creates alternative worlds – frequently addresses themes of deviance, transgression and ordering. It identifies themes of surveillance and spectacle; hyperreality and virtual reality; memory and the suppression of history; and hierarchy and difference in dystopian fiction aimed at young adults – The Hunger Games (Collins, 2008), The Maze Runner (Dashner, 2009), Divergent (Roth, 2011) and Red Rising (Brown, 2014). The chapter explores the role of this fiction in cultural imaginings of social control, repression and resistance, and argues for greater criminological attention to novels, including bestselling fiction.

scholarly journals Légitimité littéraire de la littérature jeunesse : les Hunger Games de Suzanne Collins

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-41
Author(s):  
Anne Sechin
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Hunger Games ◽  
Commercial Success ◽  
The Hunger Games ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Literary Quality

The Hunger Games trilogy, an international commercial success, enables us to question the relationship between sales records and literary quality as well as to think critically about the literary status of Young Adult Literature. Are there some objective criteria that make it possible to establish a literary status, and can they be applied to Young Adult literature, especially as those works are usually perceived as “popular culture”?

scholarly journals Wisdom, Mystery, and Dangerous Knowledge: Exploring Depictions of the Archetypal Sage in Young Adult Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-50
Author(s):  
Ian Parker Renga ◽  
Mark A. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Intimate Relationships ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Sharp Contrast ◽  
Hunger Games ◽  
Behavioral Abnormalities ◽  
The Hunger Games ◽  
Dangerous Knowledge ◽  
K 12 ◽  
Common Understanding

The archetypal sage character is a common, though relatively unexplored character, in young adult literature (YAL). Employing a sociocultural, constructivist understanding of archetypes, we unpack features of the sage through an examination of three sagacious characters: the Receiver of Memory in The Giver, Haymitch Abernathy in The Hunger Games, and Anatov in Akata Witch. Our analysis reveals how these characters are each marked with physical or behavioral abnormalities, are isolated from society and its institutions, and possess dangerous knowledge of eros (The Giver), power (The Hunger Games), and identity (Akata Witch). They are also depicted as standing in sharp contrast to other, more typical teachers in the intimate relationships they form with students and degree of vulnerability they display. All of these characteristics, we argue, might explain the appeal of the sagecharacter in YAL, as well as its curious absence from our common understanding of K-12 teachers and curriculum. Indeed, we see these characterizations of fictional teachers as raising interesting questions about sagacious mentorship and wisdom in schools.

scholarly journals Trends and Themes in Contemporary Young Adult Literature

NOTIONS ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-12
Author(s):  
Varsha Vats
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Popular Film ◽  
Hunger Games ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Hunger Games

In the past few decades, Young Adult literature has become progressively more popular. Film makers, Television, Fans, Critics and Academics all seem to have an inclination towards the Young Adult field. The present mankind genus is more engrossed in the literature contextualizing analysis of broader trends. However, while Young Adult persist to expand, it often materialize that the corpus of texts which is taught, studied, and critically examined overlap with texts discussed in the popular media; this has resulted in increasingly diminutive hyper canon of texts and is very often limited to the kinds of bestseller texts that make an enormous impact on popular traditions and ethnicity. To non-experts, the Young Adult class is often considered to be identical with huge blockbuster fiction titles like Harry Potter, The Fault in Our Stars, Twilight and The Hunger Games. The Young modern adult now seeks variant approaches with tangible trends in terms of theoretical importance, cultural significance, pedagogical value or amalgamation of all these approaches

Reenvisioning space, mobilities and public engagement with young adult literature

2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Hamilton-McKenna ◽  
Theresa Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Spatial Analyses ◽  
Literature Instruction ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Teachers And Students

Purpose In an era when engagement in public spaces and places is increasingly regulated and constrained, we argue for the use of literary analytic tools to enable younger generations to critically examine and reenvision everyday spatialities (Rogers, 2016; Rogers et al., 2015). The purpose of this paper is to consider how spatial analyses of contemporary young adult literature enrich interrogations of the spaces and places youth must navigate, and the consequences of participation for different bodies across those spheres. Design/methodology/approach In a graduate seminar of teachers and writers, we examined literary texts through a combined framework of feminist cultural geography, mobilities and critical mobilities studies. In this paper, we interweave our own spatial analyses of two selected works of young adult fiction with the reflections of our graduate student participants to explore our spatial framework and its potential to enhance critical approaches to literature instruction. Findings We argue that spatial literary analysis may equip teachers and students with tools to critically examine the spaces and places of everyday life and creatively reenvision what it means to be an engaged citizen in uncertain and troubling times. Originality/value While we have engaged in this work for several years, we found that in light of the global pandemic, coupled with the recent antiracist demonstrations, a spatial approach to literary study emerges as a potentially even more relevant and powerful component of literature instruction.

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