Why YA?

Catalog description

“All American fiction is young adult fiction,” claims cultural critic A.O. Scott. Is he right? Does it matter? In this course, we’ll undertake a survey of American young adult literature as we attempt to answer a few central questions: Can anyone actually define what “young adult” literature is? What do writers hope to accomplish through the use of young protagonists? Who gets to be “young”? And how are our cultural beliefs about “youth” – and its comrades “time” and “mortality” – expressed through these works? To explore these questions, we’ll read works by Jamaica Kincaid, Sandra Cisneros, Neal Shusterman and Akwaeke Ezewki, among others. We’ll also attempt our own experiments with some of the aesthetic modes and thematic questions that have come to define the genre.