For over a hundred years, literature teaching has experienced a constant tension between two over-arching and often opposed perspectives; the first defines literature as a way of promoting and perpetuating what we will call a cultural ideal, while the second defines literature as a form of cultural access. Let’s begin with a brief description of the two views (see Figure 5.1).
While the view of literature as a cultural ideal has changed very little over the past century, the cultural access perspective has undergone four significant shifts, each yielding a different view of the reader’s role in literary reading: reader as productive citizen; reader as active meaning maker; reader as personal authority; and reader as transformative agent.
The Reader as Productive Citizen: From Uniform Lists to Nancy Drew
In 1874, the industrial revolution was in full swing in America. The railroad had been invented, women were fighting for voting rights, and the idea of literature as a cultural ideal was gaining a firm foothold. In that year, a group of eastern colleges had just created their “uniform lists” of books that every prospective college student should read before
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Literature as Cultural Ideal Literature as Cultural Access Role of literature: Promoting and preserving a Role of literature: Engaging students in
cultural standard or ideal. developmentally appropriate reading practices, and promoting access to a broad array of texts and cultural perspectives.
View of texts: Emphasis on a fairly fixed canon of View of texts: Emphasis on literature’s potential classic literature, representing the pinnacle of in developing the cognitive, aesthetic, social, and western culture. political capacities of readers.
View of readers: Readers are subordinate to the View of readers: Readers are active meaning larger ideal of preserving the timeless cultural makers whose skills and personalities develop values of classic literature. As they understand and throughout a lifetime. As readers encounter and gain familiarity with a prescribed set of texts in the engage with literature, they develop the necessary traditional literary canon, readers are inculcated cognitive, linguistic, aesthetic, and critical skills for into the dominating culture and carry its traditions participation in a democratic society and the larger to the next generation. global community.
View of reading: Based upon an implicit argument View of reading: Based upon a view of literary that reading classic works of literature develops texts as agents of transformation in the lives of rigor and mental discipline. readers as they assume full participation in the
larger world.
View of assessment: Standardized tests on View of assessment: Authentic, contextualized knowledge of classic literary works, genre assessments focused upon multiple dimensions of characteristics, literary techniques, and literal or literary reading (comprehension, aesthetic inferential comprehension of a prescribed canon of response, reading behaviors and strategies) within literary texts. various social contexts (solitary reading, large and
small group discussion, teacher and peer conferences, dramatic enactments, and so on).
Figure 5.1 Competing Perspectives in the Literature Classroom
entering college. For the next several years, high school teachers would become increasingly preoccupied with teaching the traditional canon of literature to college-bound students. Since there was no such thing as “young adult literature” in the late nineteenth century, teenagers of the time read books that were published for adults. In school, they read Shakespeare and Silas Marner; in their free time, they read the “rags-to riches” s“rags-tories of the Horatio Alger series or what were called “domestic novels”
(moralistic tales of women’s experiences) and “dime novels” (cheap paperback melo -dramas about the frontier and other aspects of American life).
These simplistic melodramatic books must have seemed as outrageous to “cultured”
society as the novels of Danielle Steele and Stephenie Meyer may seem to many segments of American society today. Around the time the American Library Association was founded in 1875, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer were appearing on the scene. Books such as these were undoubtedly more accessible to young readers than the texts they were required to read in school. Even then, we can imagine that there existed a rather sharp line of demarcation between what young adults read in schools and what they read for pleasure.
As the twentieth century dawned, the industrial revolution had made its impact on American society. The automobile had been invented, and The Sears and Roebuck catalogue was one of the most popular books in America. Many young adults in those days read series books published by the Stratemeyer syndicate: Tom Swift, The Bobbsey Twins, The Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew were just a few popular series books. Stratemeyer was one of the first publishers to aim its books at an audience of young readers. Like the earlier “dime novels,” these series books were cheaper than adult books, but these were manufactured to look as much like adult books as possible. As sales of these series books grew to enormous proportions, they were written by ghost writers under pseudonyms. While young people devoured them, they would be denounced by everyone including librarians, teachers, and even Granville Stanley Hall (the supposed
“father” of adolescence) himself (Romalov, 1995).
As young adults were reading dime novels and series books, the mood of the nation was shifting toward a view of literacy and learning as a form of cultural access. From 1900 to the 1930s, the Progressive movement spawned a view of the reader as a productive citizen, promoting the idea that all students, regardless of abilities, social classes, or career paths, should have access to an education that would prepare them for their roles as successful members of democratic society. John Dewey, the leading proponent of Progressivism in America (1900, 1902), argued passionately that children were not empty vessels, but curious, active learners who should be given access to meaningful real-life learning activities, in order to prepare them for the important tasks they would face as citizens of a democracy.
Dewey’s ideas would emerge in the field of English education almost thirty years later, as the newly-formed Progressive Education Association commissioned Louise Rosenblatt to write the landmark Literature as Exploration (1938/1996). Rosenblatt’s theories became a literary animation of Dewey’s theory of progressive education.
Though not herself a “reader-response critic,” Rosenblatt would become known as the founder of the movement known as “response-centered” teaching that captured the hearts and imaginations of many American teachers in the 1970s and 1980s, and is still alive in contemporary classrooms. Rosenblatt opposed the ideal of “one correct interpretation” of a literary text, inspiring reader-response teachers in the latter half of the twentieth century to create independent reading programs where teenagers could respond in highly personal ways to popular young adult texts of their choosing.
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Just as the idea of literature as cultural access began to gain popularity through the work of progressivist thinkers, the perspective of literature as cultural ideal asserted itself once again. In 1920, Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler created a list of 100 books, which they believed to be the best of the Western literary canon. The narrow canon of
“great books” was adopted by many college English departments of the time, eventually gaining firm footing in 1952, when Encyclopedia Britannica first published a 54-volume set of Great Books of the Western World. Interestingly, the Great Books Founda tion is still in existence, though the current organization has rejected Adler and Hutchinson’s original canon and now includes works by women and minorities in its anthologies.
The Reader as Active Meaning Maker: From New Criticism to the Learner-centered Classroom
In 1941, a few years after J. R. R. Tolkien had published The Hobbit, and a year before Maureen Daly would write Seventeenth Summer, John Crowe Ransom published The New Criticism (1979), which elucidated the principles of the movement by the same name. Although it began in the 1920s, The New Criticism rose to prominence in the 1940s and remained extremely influential well into the 1960s. The New Critics argued that the meaning of literary texts could only be found in “close reading,” or the study of figurative language, genre characteristics, and literary technique. Even today, you can see evidence of the New Critical movement in the form of quizzes and other classroom activities focused on genre characteristics and literary terminology such as foreshadowing and figurative language.
Six years after the founding of New Criticism, the Soviets launched the famous
“Sputnik” and started the “space race.” Americans were shocked at the prospect of losing America’s preeminence in science and technology. As in most times of economic insecurity, a “back to basics” mentality pervaded much of American schooling.
At the same time, John Holt, Jonothan Kozol, and George Leonard—the so-called
“romantic critics” of education—launched scathing attacks on American schools as sites of oppressive, meaningless, decontextualized learning. John Dixon (1967), influenced by the developmental theories of Piaget and a progressivist view of the child as active, creative learner, joined a group of educators from the United Kingdom in creating the
“language and learning” movement, which promoted informal, expressive language and student choice in writing topics and reading materials. This learner-centered perspective re-defined the earlier progressivist view of the reader as productive citizen to a psychological view of reader as active meaning maker. Learner-centered views were strongly opposed by organizations such as the College Entrance Examination Board, which vigorously attacked the English curriculum in secondary schools as “an unhappy combination of old matter unrenewed and new matter that rarely rises above the level of passing concerns”
(cited in Dixon, 1967, p. xviv).
While American classrooms were caught in the tensions between the progressivist learner-centered curriculum and the text-centered perspectives of New Criticism, literature for adolescents was just about to come into its own.
From The Outsidersto A Nation at Risk: The Reader as Personal Authority
The post-Sputnik world witnessed a strong tension between those who held a cultural access perspective (all students should have access to engaging, developmentally appropriate
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literature) and those who espoused a view of literature as cultural ideal (the literature curriculum was deteriorating into mindlessness). It was into this contested space that what we now know as young adult literature made its debut. In the wake of McCarthyism and the “red scare” in 1955, two important, but philosophically opposed, events took place: Rudolph Flesch (1955) wrote Why Johnny Can’t Read, an impassioned back-to-basics plea for a return to phonics instruction, and J.D. Salinger wrote the controversial and often-censored novel The Catcher in the Rye. By 1960, a teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma would be fired for assigning Salinger’s book to an 11th grade English class. By 1967, the first examples of what became known as “realistic fiction” appeared in the form of books such as Hinton’s The Outsiders and Lipsyte’s The Contender.
The appearance of what was then called “adolescent literature” would prove extremely threatening to those who held a view of literature as cultural ideal. Librarians refused to stock it on shelves; teachers and parents denounced it as mind-numbing trash.
Nevertheless, realistic fiction began to capture the fledgling teen market and push the boundaries of what had been once considered taboo for a teenage audience. In 1969, Paul Zindel wrote My Darling, My Hamburger, which featured a young girl’s struggle with abortion. Six years later, Judy Blume wrote Forever, a controversial story of a young girl’s first sexual encounter. A decade after that, in 1982, Nancy Garden would write the highly controversial Annie on My Mind, a story of two high-school girls who fall in love.
The availability of realistic fiction for young adults was paralleled by a growing interest in making such books available to adolescents. In 1967, G. Robert Carlsen published Books and the Teen-age Reader, and in 1968 Daniel Fader and Elton McNeil published Hooked on Books, both promoting the idea that adolescents should be allowed to read literature that was accessible and appropriate to adolescent development. Very slowly, classroom teachers began to introduce young adult fiction into their classrooms, teaching paperback novels instead of anthologized literature, and creating classroom libraries of books for students’ independent reading. The various “learner-centered” movements in the 1960s and 1970s promoted a vision of the reader as personal authority. In choosing their own topics, young writers were given authority over their writing; in choosing their own literature and responding in highly personal ways, they became authorities over their own reading.
In the 1970s, a genre of young adult literature called the “problem novel” emerged.
Go Ask Alice (Anonymous), the controversial story of a young girl’s struggle with mental illness was published in 1971. Three years later, Robert Cormier wrote The Chocolate War, the story of a young boy’s refusal to sell chocolates for a school fundraiser and the disturbing consequences he faced. Many problem novels such as The Chocolate War, although popular with teenagers, were originally marketed to an adult audience, and have been widely censored, since their publication, by everyone from parents to school boards.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as student protestors were burning draft cards and protesting the war in Vietnam, college methods courses in English education were advocating this new view of the reader as personal authority. Advocates of what would become known as the “personal growth” movement argued that readers should be given access to popular texts and provided with learning experiences, tailored to their unique personalities and preferences. In contrast to the dry dull adult texts that had, for so many years, dominated the secondary English classroom, students were discovering the pleasure of reading about people their own age in circumstances similar to theirs. In 1973, the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents (ALAN) was formed within NCTE for the 84 WHAT LITERATURES ARE WE TEACHING?
purpose of promoting excellence in the teaching of adolescent literature. ALAN was one of the first professional organizations devoted to the promotion of quality young adult literature, and is still a strong force in the field of English teaching. Its journal, The Alan Review, features articles on young adult literature, reviews of current books, interviews with authors and practical articles on teaching literature to adolescents.
Around this time, Louise Rosenblatt dealt a significant blow to the New Critics with the creation of her “transactional theory” of literary reading (1978). Rosenblatt argued that the meaning of a text lay not in the text or the reader, but in the transaction between the two. Most reading in schools was what Rosenblatt called “efferent” (or informational) reading, focused on gathering information to be used in demonstrating knowledge to teachers. Reading literature, she argued, should be a process of immersing oneself in the moment-to-moment experience of the text, or what she called the
“aesthetic stance.” Aesthetic reading, she argued, rarely occurred in the classroom.
Rosenblatt’s transactional theory continues to influence literature teachers who allow students time for private independent reading, choice in the literature they read, and space in the classroom for reading as an engaging, aesthetic process.
As America moved into the “me generation” of the 1980s, the country was experiencing another time of economic uncertainty. American youth had performed poorly on achievement tests when compared with those of other industrialized nations, and Japan was vying with the United States for economic supremacy. As in earlier times of turmoil, America was moving, once again, toward a view of literacy and literature as cultural ideal. “A Nation at Risk,” published during the Reagan administration, concluded: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war“ (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983, para. 2). In 1987, E.D. Hirsch published the bestselling book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs To Know, in which he argued that America’s literacy problems were due the fact that students were not taught the common body of information necessary to function as a successful member of society. In The Closing of the American Mind (1988) Allan Bloom leveled a similar critique on university programs for failing to immerse their students in a rich tradition of classic literature and philosophy.
Against this rather conservative backdrop, Ken Goodman published What’s Whole in Whole Language (1986). The Whole Language movement promoted the belief that, in learning to read, students should be given whole texts of culturally diverse, high-quality literature as opposed to piecemeal exercises and phonics drills. A year later, Nancie Atwell published In the Middle: New Understandings about Writing, Reading, and Learning (1987/1998), an enormously successful book for middle school teachers, which popularized the idea of “reading and writing workshops” in which students meet regularly to talk about self-chosen books, engage in authentic reading for real-world purposes, and publish their own writing for a classroom audience.
In the mid 1980s, the growing racial, cultural, and ethnic diversity in American classrooms spurred an intense interest in teaching multicultural literature (see Stallworth, Gibbons, & Fauber, 2006). Literature anthologies began to reflect this movement, as quality classic and contemporary literature replaced the traditional canon of White European-American males (Applebee et al., 2006; Beers et al., 2009). By the end of the 1980s, several awards such as the Margaret A. Edwards Award, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature had been created to honor writers of young adult fiction. In the eighties, series books had made a rousing comeback. Sweet Valley High, The Babysitters’ Club, and The Boxcar Family were
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tremendously popular with older children and early adolescents. Even Nancy Drew and The Bobbsey Twins reappeared for the occasion. The 1980s also witnessed the publication of several contemporary classics of young adult literature such as Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers, Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt, Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block, and Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. In this decade, “young adult” sections of libraries and bookstores typically featured books more appropriate for middle school than high school students.
Often, older teenagers had to look in adult sections of libraries and bookstores for reading materials appropriate to their development. Literature for young adults was itself about to “come of age,” however, as an explosion of new technologies, and a growing population of teenagers loomed on the horizon.
Multiliteracies, Critical Theories, and Literature for Social Justice: The Reader as Transformative Agent
At the dawn of the millennium, young adult literature is now available in a dazzling array of topics, formats, and genres, as the seismic growth of new technologies has changed our definition of “texts” and transformed our notions of readers.
In 1994, a group of ten scholars met in New London, New Hampshire for the purpose of redefining literacy pedagogy. The New London Group created the concept of “multiliteracies,” or the notion that a multitude of literacies are needed for participation in today’s global economy and rapidly expanding universe of technological change. In
In 1994, a group of ten scholars met in New London, New Hampshire for the purpose of redefining literacy pedagogy. The New London Group created the concept of “multiliteracies,” or the notion that a multitude of literacies are needed for participation in today’s global economy and rapidly expanding universe of technological change. In