Jeunesse - Young People, Texts, Cultures (E-Journal)
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Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, and Utopia as Process in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games: “It’s the First Gift That’s Always the Hardest to Pay Back”
No full textBeginning with the observation that young adult literature has been the subject of ethical criticism from multiple sides of the ideological spectrum and drawing on Roberta Seelinger Trites’s argument that this body of work is a postmodern phenomenon, this article interrogates whether young adult literature is a morally compromised genre from the start or whether there is not a morally constructive framework through which young adult novels might be viewed productively. Using the first novel of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy as a case study, this paper proposes a heuristic that borrows from the postmodern (or “liquid modern”) ethics of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman, who interprets Emmanuel Levinas’s “ethics of ethics” as a descriptive, phenomenological, existential exercise, rejects absolutes in favour of process and an emphasis on the urge to “be-for” the Other. Through the lens of Bauman’s ethics, this paper analyzes Katniss Everdeen’s journey as a processual one, toward the end of an active moral urge.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2015.000
Postmodern Picture Books, the Postmodernesque, and Queer Failure
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Allan, Cherie. Playing with Picturebooks: Postmodernism and the Postmodernesque. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012.
Bossio, Paula. The Line. Toronto: Kids Can, 2013.
Clanton, Ben. Vote for Me! Toronto: Kids Can, 2012.
Fagan, Cary. I Wish I Could Draw. Toronto: Groundwood, 2014.
Maclear, Kyo. Virginia Wolf. Illus. Isabelle Arsenault. Toronto: Kids Can, 2012.
Rogers, Stan. Northwest Passage. As seen by Matt James. Toronto: Groundwood, 2013.
Watt, Mélanie. Chester’s Back! Toronto: Kids Can, 2013.
Young, Cybele. Ten Birds. Toronto: Kids Can, 2011.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2015.000
Outsiders and Onlookers: Formulations of Girlhood in Two Novels by Mariko Tamaki
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Tamaki, Mariko. This One Summer. Illus. Jillian Tamaki. Toronto: Groundwood, 2014.
Tamaki, Mariko. (You) Set Me on Fire. Toronto: Razorbill, 2012.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2015.000
Toward a Theory of Adolescence: Queer Disruptions in Representations of Adolescent Reading
No full textUsing queer and psychoanalytic schemas, this essay develops a theory of adolescence to shed light on the ways in which categories of age shape our experiences of ourselves and others. It draws from social discourse surrounding adolescent reading and from fictional scenes of reading in nineteenth-century novels, twentieth-century classics, and contemporary young adult fiction in order to unravel the cultural logic of adolescence as it has been deployed throughout the twentieth century.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2015.000
