Monstrous Acts: Problematizing Violence in Young Adult Literature

Abstract

Despite a growing body of work that draws attention to the presence of violence in the mass media and its effects on youth, little critical attention has been paid to the role of violence in young adult literature. The authors believe that by bringing violence to the foreground in the study of texts, they can enrich and deepen what these stories offer readers. They suggest that the study of textual representations of violence is an important and underdeveloped aspect of literary analysis. Using a conceptual model, the authors analyzed violence in contemporary young adult fiction on three levels: individual, institutional, and cultural‐structural. They present descriptive analyses of eight novels and offer ideas and resources for engaging students in critical inquiry of the violence portrayed.

“Spinning Themselves into Poetry”: Images of Urban Adolescent Writers in Two Novels for Young Adults

“…Weber (1990) contends that content analysis is a systematic research method used to note recurrent words and concepts in texts and to ''make valid inferences'' (p. 9) about the messages found within the texts. This type of analysis has been applied to investigations of the treatment of a variety of issues within literature for children and adolescents, from representations of AIDS (Blumenreich and Siegel, 2006) to gender constructions (Turner-Bowker, 1996) to depictions of violence (Franzak and Noll, 2006). Content analysis methods have also been applied to multicultural literature for young people, including portrayals of Mexican Americans in realistic fiction books (Ramirez and Dowd, 1997); colorism in Sharon Flake's The Skin I'm In (Brooks et al, 2008); and features of four novels about Black female adolescent protagonists (Boston and Baxley, 2007).…”

Critical Collaborative Inquiries in Social Studies: Fostering Inclusion, Engagement and Literacy

“…Collaborative inquiry groups are a well-documented tool to support comprehension and collaboration across subject areas and grade levels (Harvey & Daniels, 2015;Ohn & Wade, 2009). Critical inquiry involves engaging students in problematizing, critique, and inquiry (Fecho, 2004;Franzak & Noll, 2006). Laman, Smith, and Kander (2006), use the work of Edelsky, Christensen, Vasquez and others to demonstrate the connection between critical literacy, critical inquiry, and action.…”

Museum Literacies and Adolescents Using Multiple Forms of Texts “On Their Own”

“…Such activities would be familiar to literacy educators especially if they conceptualize museum space as text, exhibits as chapters, and so forth; the museum treasure hunt is expressly a search-and-find activity in which answers are embedded in the museum text, or in words familiar to literacy educators-"right there" and "think and search" questions and answers (Raphael, 1986). The questions listed in Table 3 (adapted from Franzak & Noll, 2006), which treat museum objects and the spaces they occupy as textual compositions, could be a first step in nudging museum visits beyond simple field trips.…”

“…In this vein, Periwinkle's statement about the impressive warrior's garment, "We just looked at it," may point to pleasures of seeing not fettered by goals of formal learning and perhaps supports notions that Table 3 Questions for Guiding Museum Learning Note. Adapted from Franzak and Noll (2006).…”