| This dissertation explores the ways that time creates and defines the anxieties of adolescence in young adult literature and how that temporality writes the adolescent experience. Negotiations with the past, present, and future create conflict for the characters in these novels. Furthermore, many of the tensions and conflicts within these texts exist because of the anxiety of time, including an increasing knowledge that the passing of time is inevitable, a general anxiety about lost childhood and impending adulthood, and a growing awareness that the body is the only persistent artifact of that passing time.;These anxieties of time appear in young adult literature for two reasons. The first is that "real" adolescents themselves are developing a greater awareness and understanding of linear time; thus, adolescent characters mirror that tendency. In the texts under discussion, for example, temporality influences both the events of the novels and the rhetorical composition of the narratives. Second, time becomes a way to "write" the adolescent body through constructed discourses of temporality. The body is an important---even essential---part of adolescent life, yet there are no real bodies in the texts. Writing about time, then, becomes a substitute for the bodies that do not and cannot exist within the narrative. Because the body can act as an artifact of time and a site for interacting with linear time, temporality represents corporeality. I conclude by examining anxieties of the readers, specifically student readers, as they study young adult literature in the college classroom. Recognizing the ways students use narratives of their own adolescence to connect to the literature, I argue that time is a crucial element both within the texts and as a context for the reading and teaching of young adult novels. |
