Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism

by Michael Cart

  It would seem that teens—and even many librarians—continue to equate nonfiction with textbooks; the fact that the lion’s share of nonfiction is still published as curriculum-driven series by institutional publishers surely doesn’t help, though even these books have shown marked improvement in recent years. As author Elaine Landau suggested in 2006, “The lines between series and trade nonfiction begin to blur a bit” (Weisman 2006, 59).

  Despite all of the extraordinary advances that have been made in the field, nonfiction remains the kitchen-bound Cinderella of young adult literature, while her stepsister—fiction—remains the belle of the ball. But a glass slipper may finally be at hand. In 2009 YALSA finally created the Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults. The first award (and honors, if any) will be presented in 2010. Will it make a difference? Will it turn nonfiction from scullery maid to princess? Time will tell. But the latest developments in publishing—as we will see in the next chapter—suggest that if it is the latter, her palace may well be a virtual one.

  Note

  1. Aronson writes insightfully about nonfiction and many other aspects of young adult literature and publishing in his two collections of essays and speeches: Exploding the Myths and Beyond the Pale (Scarecrow, 2001 and 2003, respectively).

  of books and bytes

  Multiple Literacies, the Death of Print,

  and Other Imponderables

  My more culturally aware readers may have already noted that what I’ve been calling the new golden age of young adult literature coincides almost exactly with what is also widely regarded as the age of irony.1 I mention this because I find it so wonderfully ironic that the field’s renaissance, which has driven the publication of more YA books than ever before, should have occurred during the same period in which many people are also saying that—thanks to a dazzling array of digital distractions—no one is reading books any longer.

  Are Young Adults Reading?

  The catalyst for much of this dire muttering was a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts study titled Reading at Risk, which found that “the percentage of Americans reading literature has dropped dramatically over the past 20 years” (ix). Although this sounds suspiciously like hyperbole, the statistics reported were, indeed, startling, showing that the percentage of U.S. adults reading literature had dropped from 56.9 in 1982 to 46.7 in 2002. More to our point, the most precipitous drop (from 59.8 percent in 1982 to 42.8 percent in 2002) took place among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, which led the report writers to note, “The trends among younger adults warrant special concern, suggesting that unless some effective solution is found, literary culture and literacy in general will continue to worsen” (xiii).

  Critics of the report—and there were many—pointed out that the NEA’s definition of reading was a very narrow one (“confoundingly narrow,” charged Charles McGrath), limited—as it was—to novels, poetry, and plays. Nonfiction was not included, nor were magazines or newspapers or any reading that was done in association with work or study. Even more interesting, though quick to imply it might be partly responsible for the decline, the report did not consider the Internet at all, even though, as McGrath (2004c, WK3) pointed out, “When people surf the Web, what they are doing, for the most part, is reading.”

  Sensitive to these criticisms, the NEA issued a follow-up report in 2007. Titled “To Read or Not to Read,” it expanded its definition of reading to include all kinds of reading, a category that includes reading done online. It also broadened its statistical base to include data from some two dozen other studies by the Education and Labor Departments; the Census Bureau; plus selected academic, foundation, and business surveys. Despite this expansion, the 2007 findings were no more positive than those of 2004, showing a continuing decline in both reading and reading proficiency, especially—now— among those between the ages of nine and seventeen. “These trends,” the new study noted, “are concurrent with a falloff in daily pleasure reading among young people as they progress from elementary to high school. In 2006, for example, the data found that 15 to 24-year-olds were spending only 7 to 10 minutes a day voluntarily reading anything at all” (Thompson 2007). This is especially unfortunate, as the new study also showed that students who did read for fun nearly every day performed better in reading tests than did those who reported reading never or hardly at all.

  This study, too, excited considerable debate and criticism, ranging from reservations about its data to its perceived lack of nuance.2 Timothy Shanahan, past president of the International Reading Association, told the New York Times, “I don’t disagree with the NEA’s notion that reading is important, but I’m not as quick to discount the reading that I think young people are really doing” (a reference, according to the Times, to reading on the Internet) (Rich 2007).

  Marc Aronson concurred, arguing that the problem was not a crisis in reading “but, rather, a problem on the part of adults who idolize a certain kind of fiction reading and have trouble making sense of the mixture of fiction, digital information, nonfiction and assigned reading that make up the diet of the YA reader” (Cart 2007, 42).

  Similarly, the educational technology consultant and former YALSA president Linda Braun said, “The more willing adults are to recognize the important role that technology-based reading—blogs, wikis, text messages, and the like—has in teen lives, the more likely it is that teens will start to think of themselves as readers” (Cart 2007, 42).

  We will address the role of the Internet in young adult reading in a moment, but first we should acknowledge that reading advocates were surprised by the unheralded release of yet another NEA report in 2009, especially because this one, Reading on the Rise, found that after twenty years of decline, “literary reading has risen among adult Americans” (1).

  And “best of all,” NEA Chair Dana Gioia wrote, “the most significant growth has been among young adults, the group that had shown the largest declines in earlier surveys. The youngest group (ages 18–24) has undergone a particularly inspiring transformation from a 20% decline in 2002 to a 21% increase in 2008” (National Endowment for the Arts 2009, 1).

  What on earth caused such a dramatic about-face? “There is no statistical answer to this question,” Gioia wrote—a bit coyly, I fear. He then went on to credit “the heightened sense of urgency created by alarming studies like ‘Reading at Risk’ and ‘To Read or Not to Read’ [to cite only NEA’s own contributions to the genre].”

  Certainly some credit is owed the NEA, but might an increase in online reading also have played a part in this rise? Gioia doesn’t say, only reiterating earlier equations of reading declines with “an unprecedented large variety of electronic entertainment and communication options” (National Endowment for the Arts 2009, 1–2). Nevertheless, the study did note one positive link in finding that 15 percent of adults surveyed said they do, indeed, read literature on the Internet.

  As for children and teens, a separate study—the 2008 Kids and Family Reading Report commissioned by Scholastic and conducted by the Yankelovitch consumer trends research company—found that nearly two in three of nine- to seventeen-year-olds surveyed have extended their reading experience via the Internet (e.g., visited a fan site, visited an author’s website, used the Internet to find books by a particular author), and “high frequency Internet users are more likely to read books for fun every day” (Sellers 2008).

  All of this discussion, however, begs another, even more basic question.

  Can Young Adults Read?

  In 2006 the Washington Post reported that the Alliance for Excellent Education was estimating that 6 million middle and high school students couldn’t read at acceptable levels. “Educators said it’s difficult to pin down one cause,” the Post added. “Bad teaching, chaotic home lives, low expectations for some students, cultural bias, the fact that older students simply don’t read enough— all have been faulted.” “Kids who are struggling readers have developed strategies to avoid reading,” Sylvia Edwards, a reading special
ist with the Maryland State Department of Education, told the Post. “They are under the radar, scraping by” (Aratani 2006, B1).

  Also under the radar—where it had been too long—was the entire issue of adolescent literacy. As early as 1999, Carol Santa, then president of the International Reading Association, had said, “Adolescents are being shortchanged. Nobody is giving their literacy needs much press; there is little funding for adolescent literacy, and the topic is not a priority among educational policy makers or in the schools” (Reading Today 1999, 1).

  To redress this oversight, the IRA issued its first position statement on adolescent literacy that same year, flatly asserting, “The reading, writing, and language development of adolescents is just as important and requires just as much attention as that of beginning readers” (Reading Today 1999, 22).

  In a field that had always focused on elementary school reading instruction, the idea that literacy might be a developmental process and the acquiring of its skills a continuum was a new one that began exciting considerable professional attention. In 2004, for example, the National Council of Teachers of English issued a position-action statement of its own, “A Call to Action,” which stated, “Reading is not a technical skill acquired once and for all in the primary grades, but rather a developmental process. A reader’s competence continues to grow through engagement with various types of texts and wide reading for various purposes over a lifetime.”3

  The new focus on adolescent literacy seems to have arrived in the nick of time, for testing by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the so-called Nation’s Report Card) soon revealed the critical nature of this problem. The NAEP scores, released in 2007, showed that an alarming 65 percent of the nation’s high school seniors and 71 percent of eighth graders were reading below grade level, and only 2 percent read at an advanced level.

  As literacy skills have continued to stagnate or decline, both the IRA and the NCTE have begun searching for ways to engage students with books and other means of reading. Marsha Sprague, author of the IRA-published book Their Voices: Engaging Adolescent Girls with Young Adult Literature, suggests that teachers “give adolescents books that help teens make sense of their lives, with the idea that if they see reading as meaningful, they will want to read more” (Reading Today 2007, 12).

  What better books to serve this indispensable purpose than those published for and about young adults?

  Jonathan Eakle, director of the Reading Program at Johns Hopkins University agrees, saying, “One of the key pieces that must be present in the instruction of adolescent readers is authenticity. Reluctance is often related to relevance. Students don’t see how what they’re being asked to do is related to their lives, in the present or the future. Making the connection between literacy education and real life means teaching students how to gather, organize and design multimedia texts … to navigate the architectures of digital and real space” (Flanagan 2008, 7–8).

  The Rise of Multiple Literacies

  Multimedia texts, the architectures of digital and real space—what do such esoteric terms have to do with reading? Well, quite a lot, apparently.

  “Now, at the start of the 21st century,” writes Howard Gardner, a professor of cognitive psychology at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, “there’s a dizzying set of literacies available—written languages, graphic displays, and notations. And there’s an even broader array of media—analog, digital, electronic, hand-held, tangible, and virtual—from which to pick and choose” (2008, B01).

  Annette Lamb, professor of library and information science at Indiana University, agrees: “I think we’re already moving through a redefinition of ‘literacy.’ Computer literacy is only a small part of what young people need to be learning. I think information fluency is much broader than computer literacy. People who consider words on a paper page as the only form of ‘real reading’ are missing a large part of what people need to be information fluent in today’s society” (Hill 2009, 112).

  Some experts argue that young people need to be masters of visual literacy, media literacy, information literacy, technological literacy, and more— “all of which require the ability to read and write in multiple contexts across diverse media” (Carter 2009, 114–15).

  No wonder YALSA chose “How We Read Now” as the theme of its first-ever YA Literature Symposium, held in Nashville in 2008. Or that Gardner predicts that “literacy—or an ensemble of literacies—will continue to thrive but in forms and formats we can’t yet envision” (2008, B01).

  In the meantime, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 93 percent of twelve- to seventeen-year-olds presently go online, 63 percent of those on a daily basis. And according to the Kaiser Family Foundation (Foehr 2006), the amount of media content that eight- to eighteen-year-olds are exposed to each day has increased to eight and a half hours, but because young people multitask, they pack that content into an average of six and a half hours per day, including three hours of watching television, two hours listening to music, more than an hour spent on the computer (outside of homework), and just under an hour playing video games. Surprisingly, nearly three of four also read for pleasure, averaging forty-three minutes per day, though how much of this reading is done while multitasking, the report does not say, nor does it say whether any of this pleasure reading is done online—which raises yet another question.

  Is Reading Online Actually Reading?

  Reading online is actually reading, but apparently it differs significantly from traditional reading on a printed page. The renowned web researcher Jakob Nielsen, who tested 232 people to determine how they read pages on screens, found they followed a pattern that looks like a capital letter F. Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation, explains: “At the top [of the screen] users read all the way across, but as they proceed, their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored” (Bauerlein 2008). Speed is the hallmark of such reading, and—no surprise—another Nielsen test has found that teenagers skip through the Web even faster than adults do, but with a lower success rate for completing tasks online (55 percent compared to 65 percent).

  A recent study from University College London (2008) reports similar findings: “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed, there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages, and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”

  “The result,” Nicholas Carr (2008) wrote in his influential Atlantic Monthly article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” “is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.”

  If true, this finding will be particularly disturbing to fans of the newly literary young adult fiction that has finally, finally, made a place in its pages for just such ambiguity, a staple of artful fiction, but one that—apparently— commands no place in fiction or other literary forms that one might find online.

  Indeed, it seems the Internet is no friend to any kind of complex or longform reading. Naomi Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, “worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts ‘efficiency’ and ‘immediacy’ above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace” (Carr 2008).

  What the Internet favors instead, it seems, is the presentation of information, and the most successful information is that which is immediately available and in bite-size form. The long-range consequence of this may actually be a change in cognition. “What the Net seems to be doing
,” Carr laments (almost confessionally), “is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now takes in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.”

  Not everyone agrees with this gloomy assessment, of course. Writing in the New Yorker, for example, Caleb Crain (2007) says, “The Internet, happily, does not so far seem to be antagonistic to literacy.” In support of his claim he cites a recent study of Michigan children and teenagers that found “grades and reading scores rose with the amount of time spent online. Even visits to pornography Web sites improved academic performance.

  “Of course,” he allows, “such synergies may disappear if the Internet continues its YouTube-fuelled evolution away from print and toward television.”

  Even more optimistic than Crain is Steven Johnson, author of the recent book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, a paean to video gaming, film, television, and the Internet. But even Johnson (2005, 185), while claiming that, “thanks to e-mail and the Web we’re reading text as much as ever, and we’re writing more,” admits that “it is true that a specific, historically crucial kind of reading has grown less common in this society: sitting down with a 300-page book and following its argument or narrative without a great deal of distraction. We deal with text now in shorter bursts, following links across the Web, or sifting through a dozen e-mail messages.”

  E-Books and the Future of Print

  As technology continues to evolve, another digital form of reading has recently emerged: the e-book. Thanks to Amazon.com’s introduction of its electronic book reader Kindle in October 2007 and the corollary popularity of the Sony e-book reader, the electronic book may have finally—after nearly a decade of failed efforts—become a viable alternative to the paper book, a prospect made even more probable by the introduction, in 2009, of both the third-generation Kindle DX (which can hold 1,500 titles and wirelessly download books in sixty seconds) and Barnes & Noble’s first electronic book reader.