English 166

Description

How can the young adult be a figure of propaganda and a deeply subversive figure? And what does it do today? The adolescent has been at the crux of the American national imaginary for a century now, leveraged for its political power, its physical limitations, and its oddly slippery agency. This course will be a historical examination of young adult literature beginning with the post-WWII conceptions and anxieties around the newly coined “teenager” and youth cultures. We will look through the different renditions of the young adult through—for example—the "problem novels" of the 1960s and 70s, the chick lit and “sick lit” of the 80s, 90s and 00s, and the quick expansion of the YA marketing category at the turn of the millennium into YA dystopian fiction juggernauts such as The Hunger Games. We’ll end with a collaborative view on the genre and the form of the young adult as we might interpret it today in the 2020s. We will explore how the “young adult” figure and genre has been used both as a tool of indoctrination and as a subversive form of social critique—and some really fun rides! We’ll be working with a multimedia mixture of novels, films, episodes of television shows, social media and some critical readings.