| Building off of the Harry Potter Effect, the Young Adult (YA) novel is a best selling, big business success story. The YA novel---a novel written for and about teens---is a contemporary literacy phenomenon, one that paradoxically coexists with prominent worries about the reading failure of our youth. How might a deeper understanding of the genre of the YA novel and the teens who read it inform our thinking about reading adolescents and adolescents reading? If school assessments reveal teens to be struggling readers, while the YA industry reveals teens as enthusiastic readers, what productive use might language arts (or any) teachers make of this discrepancy? Of what use is it for teachers to reach outside of school to help them teach reading and literature inside of school? In this dissertation I offer a literary analysis of the contemporary YA novel, as well as a qualitative analysis of a group of teen YA readers who gather in an urban public library. I offer a detailed genre description of the YA novel, considering its development and features. As well, I offer five metaphors characterizing how teens read this genre: Reading as Navigation; Reading as Sleuthing; Reading as Writing; Reading as Belonging; and Reading as Pleasure. Together these two perspectives offer insights into ways that we might open up the teaching of literature in our secondary schools, including using genre as a pedagogic tool, teaching literature as art, using writing as a way to teach the reading of literature, and honoring the political and social approach to reading found in our libraries. |
