ABC blog, bonus post: Å

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Although I promised that the Z post would be the last, I cannot refrain from bonus posts based on the final letters of the Swedish alphabet. I promise solemnly that I won't continue with Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew or Futhark, although it is tempting.

Å is for ångest, which in Swedish means ”anxiety” or ”anguish” and is sometimes referred to with its German equivalent ”Angst”. For some reason, English-speaking people, who are generally hostile toward all things alien, love German philosophical terms such as Angst or Dasein. I think it is just translators being lazy.

Anxiety is omnipresent in young adult literature because being an adolescent is one huge uncertainty. Too late to go back to childhood, but not quite adult yet. Although apparently there is a new kind of literature now, NewAdult (NA) literature which, as far as I can see, is devoid of anxiety. 

ABC blog: Y

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Y is for young adult. I didn't know much about it before I moved to Sweden because I was mostly interested in fantasy, and at that time fantasy tended to be for younger children. During my first year in Sweden I took a course in young adult fiction. The instructor, who later became my supervisor, had an interesting approach to teaching. She didn't give us required reading for every session, but a list from which we were supposed to read as much as possible. Being an obedient student, I read everything. It was mostly Swedish YA because it was a huge, internationally acknowledged genre, candid and engaging, with explicit sex, violence, drugs, teenage parenthood and everything that children's literature critics today think is new and daring. It wasn't all good literature, and very few books are still in print or even mentioned in textbooks, but it was a large area of study in Sweden in the early 1980s.

After that first course I went on to my thesis on fantasy, but as soon as I started teaching myself, YA became one of my subjects because it was a mandatory course for all secondary teacher trainees. It still had a strong focus on Swedish literature, but you cannot really talk YA without first looking at Huckleberry Finn and Little Women, and of course The Catcher in the Rye is central and has always been one of my favourite books. And then there was Aidan Chambers whose novels my students loved, and when he was in Sweden, which he often was then, I would invite him to give a talk.

In my book From mythic to linear, YA is defined by linearity, when the cyclical time, kairos, opens up, and there is no way back. The age of the protagonist or the reader has nothing to do with it. But, tied to linearity, YA brings in all the questions that a child was spared or pretended not to notice: growing up, sexuality, selfhood, parental revolt, risk taking.

YA today is more interesting and challenging than thirty years ago: not in themes, but in expressive means. It has also abandoned the constraints of everyday realism and branched into many different genres. A wide field for experimental writing, just as risky as adolescence itself.

ABC blog: C

See previous entries A B

C is for crossvocalisation. Like with aetonormativity, I coined this word because I needed it. It means that a male author uses a female first-person narrator and the other way round. I used crossdressing as analogy. Crossvocalisation is a performance: what interested me was whether a female narrative voice genuinely performs as female, which of course led to a whole bunch of questions about what it means for a voice to be male or female, because narrative voice, as everything else in a narrative text is a construction and has nothing to do with the real author's gender, nor the protagonist's gender. I tested the idea at a major children's literature conference, and the editor of a major journal asked me to develop my paper into an article. The reviewers found lots of petty faults with the article, but failed to notice my revolutionary approach to narrative, and the article was rejected. I published it in Swedish, and then I reworked it into a chapter in Power, Voice and Subjectivity. If you google it, there are 1,500 hits, most of them to my book, and some to course syllabi where the book is used. I haven't seen it employed in further scholarship, so here is your chance.

When I wrote that first article and even in my book I found very few examples of successful male-female crossvocalisation, while there were scores of female writers who used male voices. I also noticed that when male authors did use female voices, gender was often blurred by other, more prominent features, such as ethnicity or genre. I jumped to conclusions, but since then I have read some superb crossvocalised novels, such as The Fault in Our Stars and She is Not Invisible, so apparently male YA authors have recently become bolder in their choices of narrative perspective. Which makes me glad, because I didn't like the idea that women should be more imaginative and empathetic than men.

C is of course also for carnival and chronotope, which I have already mentioned; and it is for cats, a subject that I have studied academically as well as empirically.

Book of the week: Slated

WARNING: spoilers!

After Divergent I promised myself that I would never read another Young Adult dystopia. Yet for some reason I got enticed by Slated, partially because I have met the author, but also there was something in the blurb that made me curious. Perhaps because I have been reading so much about the brain. I bet Teri Terry has read a lot of the same sources.

Opening the book I saw three features that normally make me want to close it again immediately: first-person narrative, present tense, italics to mark a dream. Still I usually give a book a chance of twenty pages before I throw it away in rage, and I didn't. For once, the present tense is justified. The protagonist/narrator has had her memory obliterated; she lives in the present. First-person perspective is counterbalanced by the dreams (well, in italics, but you can't have everything right. I am almost sure the editor insisted on the italics. Editors always think their readers are idiots). It creates heteroglossia. Counterpoint. Tension.

Scores of literary texts have dealt with the unreliability of memory; in fact I think most literature does it some way or other. I like Terry's take on it. It does not feel artificial, which it easily could have. The gradual and painful remembrance is piercing. I am with the character. I want to know more about her. I want to know what the chip in her brain makes her do and whether she will cope with it. I am so engaged with her that I don't care about minor inconsistencies that felt irritating on the first twenty pages. The novel takes place in 2052 (unnecessarily spelled out). The world has changed dramatically in the past forty years, but forty years from now Terry believes that it will be more or less the same. What her protagonist has gone through has been done, perhaps with less technological sophistication, for years and years. The family structure is the same, the school system is the same, and as a step in socialisation, a sixteen-year-old girl is sent off to put a letter in a mailbox. Mailbox in 2052? And a letter to whom? Well, never mind. It's all background noise. I want to know what happens to the character. I want to know how the author manages the impossible. Killing off a number of secondary characters, including the object of the protagonist's romantic interest, is a good strategy.

What I cannot help thinking about and what the author definitely did not think about is that what she describes as a dystopia was once a fact. People who read 1984 as science fiction have not lived in a totalitarian country. Millions of children during the years of Communist terror in the Soviet Union were separated from their parents and had their brains slated, with or without technical assistence, given new names and new histories so that they would never remember who they were. Kyla's identity number is around 19,000 – the fictional government has been extremely inefficient in their slating project. Reality always surpasses fiction.

The ending clearly prepares for a sequel. It seems unavoidable these days. I will not read the sequel. I am not interested in exactly what happened to Ben or whether Kyla's new teacher is her biological father. I hope Kyla does not join the terrorists to avenge Ben, because I don't believe there is any justification for terrorism, anytime, anywhere. Not even in fiction.

For me Kyla's story is finished, in the perfect fusion of past and present tense and of her split selves, and no more italics. The author has done a marvellous job portraying a maimed, incomplete mind with the sadly inadequate means available, our human language. Any sequel will merely be adventure.