Children's/Young Adult Literature and Culture (Dominguez)

In today’s globalised world, children show much fad towards narratives, whether it is written (book) or visual (film). In to some extent these narratives help them for edification and moral-uplftment.  Paul Auster observes the affinity of children towards narratives and says: a child’s need for stories is as fundamental as he needs food. As the film industry has mainly focused on adaptation of narratives, my paper intents to come with the process of narration in different mediums by considering them as two different entities of an author.

                In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain creates the central character Huckleberry Finn according to his vision of childhood. Twain’s attempt at depicting an adolescent boy in the throes of manhood in a trilogy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn being second, points at his interest in the mysteries of boyhood.

The purpose of feminist re-visioning is to free us from the cultural restraints which “bind us unknowingly to their designs” and allow us to “name the reality” reflected in literary texts. Judith Fetterly’s assertion that “literature is political” is true not only of novels, but also for what are often presumed to be the simplest forms of story: picture books.

This essay examines M. T. Anderson’s contemporary young adult novel, Feed, in light of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s 1947 publication, Dialectic of Enlightenment. In Anderson’s dystopia, individuals exist as passive consumers living in a world where virtual reality and actual reality are indistinguishable, thus creating a situation where criticism is nearly impossible. The paper explores the young adult reader as a critic who awakens to actual reality.