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

Author(s):  
Ian Parker Renga ◽  
Mark A. Lewis

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.

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-41
Author(s):  
Anne Sechin

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”?


NOTIONS ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-12
Author(s):  
Varsha Vats

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


Lexicon ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Farhani Nurhusna

The use of sentence fragments is generally discouraged in good English writing because they lack one or more essential components of a sentence, namely a subject and/or a predicate, and thus are grammatically unacceptable. However in fiction writing, the use of sentence fragments is not only quite common in dialogue, but in narration as well. The present study analyses sentence fragments in the narration of the first novel of the young-adult science-fiction trilogy The Hunger Games written by Suzanne Collins, to investigate the types of fragments employed in the novel and their classification based on syntactic structure in the form of dependent-clause fragments and phrase fragments. The sentence fragments were further analysed for their use based on the context of their preceding sentences. The use of sentence fragments in the novel basically serves the function of creating emphasis or stressing important points in the story.


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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-89
Author(s):  
Zhange Ni

Abstract In this selective overview of scholarship generated by The Hunger Games—the young adult dystopian fiction and film series which has won popular and critical acclaim—Zhange Ni showcases various investigations into the entanglement of religion and the arts in the new millennium. Ni introduces theories, methods, and the latest developments in the study of religion in relation to state politics, audio/visual art, material culture, reality TV, and transmedia projects, whilst also reading The Hunger Games as a story that explores the variety, complexity, and ambiguity of enchantment. In popular texts such as The Hunger Games, religion and art—both broadly construed, that is, beyond conventional boundaries—converge in creating an enchantment that makes life more bearable and effects change in the world.


2021 ◽  
pp. 51-75
Author(s):  
Khrystyna Pavliuk

Introduction. The article examines the onymic parcel of the English young-adult dystopian novel conceptosphere based on the material of S. Collins’ trilogy «The Hunger Games». The theory of generations has proved the dominance of the main archetype of the hero for a circle of potential readers of the analyzed works, so the leading concept of dystopian novels is the concept of the hero around whom events take place, catalyst and initiator of which he acts. These protagonists are nominated by their own names, which serve as organizers of the artistic space. In the literary work onyms become the pillars of memory, the organizers of the mental lexicon, the coordinators of the mental world picture, the compact repository of significant information in a small form. The purpose. The purpose of the article is to analyze the onymic parcel of the English young-adult dystopian novel conceptosphere based on the material of S. Collins’ trilogy «The Hunger Games». The object is the onymic sector of the conceptosphere of the studied trilogy. The subject is the specifics of its structure and organization. Materials and methods. The analysis of the onymic parcel of the conceptosphere of the studied works was carried out in several stages: the cognitive features of the dominant onymic concept nominating the main character were established; a free associative experiment was conducted; systematized and described the reactions with the selection of their types; the most frequent associates are singled out, which are grouped into associative semantic gestalts. The material of the study was a trilogy «The Hunger Games» («The Hunger Games», «Catching Fire», «Mockingjay»), with a total volume of 1160 conditional pages. Results. An associative experiment with stimuli to denote the protagonists was conducted, which made it possible to establish the conceptualization and categorization of these anthroponyms in the mental lexicon of English speakers, detection of reflection in the received associations of hierarchical conceptual structures in the minds of respondents. Сonclusions. Summarizing the above, we can emphasize that the artistic onymic concept KATNISS of the onymic parcel of the conceptosphere of the trilogy «The Hunger Games» has cognitive features SACRIFICE, FEMININITY, HOPE, DEFENDER, VENGEANCE, WINNER and forms semantic associative gestalts THE MAIN CHARACTER OF THE NOVEL / FILM and NOVEL / FILM.


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