Literary Development (Assignment #1 c. - LLED 441 96A)

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Do you think literary development is important?  If so, why?  If not, why not?  What does this entail for you?







"Listen," he said one afternoon in the library. "You have to read a book three times before you know it. The first time you read it for the story. The plot. The movement from scene to scene that gives the book its momentum, its rhythm. It's like riding a raft down a river. You're just paying attention to the currents. Do you understand that? (94)
   Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian)
                          
In Sherman Alexie's novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian Gordie tells Junior that to know a book you need to read it three times.  The first time for plot, the second as a serious investigation of each word and each moment, and the third time "with the real possibility that you will get a metaphorical boner at any point"(95-97).  What he means by his last piece of advice is that you should be open to a feeling of awe at gaining access to a tiny part of a wide and mysterious world. I couldn't agree more, although I would add that some texts might invite more than three readings, and some texts will be left behind at only a glance. Reading literature is a little bit like looking at a really fine painting.  Some pieces linger in your brain long after you've finished your first look.  They invite you back for more.  Just as you might come back to a fine piece of art over and over again, so it is with a good book.  Each time you might notice something different.  Each look brings a deeper understanding and a deeper appreciation.  Each return elicits new connections because you also bring with you new experiences enabling a different interaction with the text. I never discourage students from rereading their favorite books, though I typically ask them to try to explain what it is about the text that draws them back for another read.  Their search for an answer can help in their literary development.  And an understanding of that which draws us to a piece of art or text of any kind is important because it also helps us to understand ourselves.  

When we are moved by a piece of art or text we are also in some way shaped by it.  Irina Rata writes, "Children's books have the potential to be the most influential books in someone's life, being the first books that a person reads; having the power to form the reader's personality, character, value system, and even the reader's taste" (Rata, 2014).  One of the first chapter books I read on my own was Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables.  The story helped to shape my love of nature, a believe in the independence of women, a value for creativity and individual expression, a sense of community mindedness, and an interest in reading, writing, and teaching.  Perhaps we are more susceptible to the texts of our youth because it is a time of rapid intellectual, social, emotional and physical development.  Our identities are more malleable.  

Texts have such power over us, and for this reason literary development is important to help us understand the ideology embedded within the text.  Several modules from this course have contained articles reflecting on the impossibility of 'real' children's literature and on the imbalance of power between a text and its young reader. The articles postulate that children and YA literature is always written by an adult to an idealized child (Frijhoff, 2012; Hill, 2014; Rata, 2014; Short, 2015).  Frijhoff suggests that the texts are written by adults who have the child they once were in their minds, therefore creating texts about imagined children of a prior time and place (Frijhoff, 2012), and Rata writes, "[T]hese books must represent the adults' values, morals, knowledge, ideas that are manipulating the child reader" (Rata, 2014). Short et al. write, "The child, whom the narrator addresses, is not the real child, but rather the concept of the child, an imaginary child or an idealized child, that the author tries to educate and influence in one way or another" (Short, 2015). Craig Hill's article, Young Adult Literature and Scholarship Come of Age, suggests that the power imbalance between the adult and the child leads to manipulation as the text influences the child with its various ideologies.  Hill advocates for increased teaching of literary analysis to adolescence to disrupt this imbalance of power: "When adolescent readers can recognize and articulate the constructs of a text [and] can locate and critique the overt or cover ideology in a novel...they will control the production of meaning and not be controlled by the ideology of the author" (Hill, 2014).  By understanding the way texts work - their conventions, form, unique features, and the context in which they were written -  young readers may become more in control of the messaging embedded within these texts and less susceptible to manipulation.   

Because texts have such potential power to shape and manipulate, it is important for adults and educators to also have an understanding of literary development.  We ourselves have been shaped by the literature we've read.  In particular, we have been shaped by the literature of our youth (literature which frequently represents a white, middle-class majority) and we may reach for these texts because they have become part of our personal canon. These may not be texts which represent the lives of our students.  In the article Mirrors and Windows: Teaching and Research Reflection on Canadian Aboriginal Children's Literature Wiltse shares Ingrid Johnston's thought (2010) that "it is important to be able to recognize ourselves in a book, particularly if we, as readers, are from a culture that has been marginalized or previously unrecognized in literary texts in the west" (Johnston, 2019, cited in Wiltse, 2015).  Without understanding the forces which have shaped our canon and without a clear understanding of the constructs of the texts we select for young people we may unwittingly do damage to their sense of identity or sense of self as a reader.  In the article,  What's Trending in Children's Literature and Why it Matters, Short et al. write, "Children who are missing [in literature] and underrepresented may either take on a deficit societal notion of the culture or reject literacy as relevant for their lives, [while] children who constantly see themselves in books...are also negatively affected, as they develop perspectives of privilege and superiority based on false impressions of the world" (Short et al., 2018). When we understand the texts which have had an impact on us, as readers, we may also become more aware of their ideologies and more careful in how we share them with adolescents and youth. Our understanding is increased with an overview of the development of children's literature as a whole and with our ability to deconstruct texts.  Therefore, as the purchasers of children's literature, it is also important for adults to have an understanding of literary development.   

Finally, returning to the idea I started with, there is aesthetic joy in gaining access to the mysteries of a text.  It is not unlike the enjoyment of finding and holding the pieces of a puzzle in your hand and eventually seeing the way they all work together to create a work of art. When all the pieces come together the viewer may experience a sense of euphoria.  Literary development is important not only as a means to resist manipulation or to our understanding of self, but to our sense of wonder.  It feeds the soul. 

Bibliography

Alexie, Sherman. (2007). The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company. 

Frijhoff, W. (2012). Historian's Discovery of Childhood. Paedagogica Historica, 48(1), 11-29. 

RAȚĂ, I. (2014). Children’s literature - A cinderella story. Cultural Intertexts, 1(2), 236-251.

Short, Kathy, and Kathy G Short. "What's Trending in Children's Literature and Why it Matters." Language Arts, vol. 95, no. 5, 05/01/2018, pp. 287-29

Wiltse, L. (2015). Mirrors and windows: Teaching and research reflections on Canadian Aboriginal children's literature. Language and Literacy, 17(2), 22-n/a.