Beyond the Blockbusters

Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction

Rebekah Fitzsimmons, Casey Alane Wilson, Rebekah Fitzsimmons, Casey Alane Wilson

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496827159
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contributions by Megan Brown, Jill Coste, Sara K. Day, Rachel Dean-Ruzicka, Rebekah Fitzsimmons, Amber Gray, Roxanne Harde, Tom Jesse, Heidi Jones, Kaylee Jangula Mootz, Leah Phillips, Rachel L. Rickard Rebellino, S. R. Toliver, Jason Vanfosson, Sarah E. Whitney, and Casey Alane WilsonWhile critical and popular attention afforded to twenty-first-century young adult literature has exponentially increased in recent years, classroom materials and scholarship have remained static in focus and slight in scope. Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Fault in Our Stars, and The Hate U Give overwhelm conversations among scholars and critics—but these are far from the only texts in need of analysis. Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction offers a necessary remedy to this limiting perspective, bringing together essays about the many subgenres, themes, and character types that have until now been overlooked. The collection tackles a diverse range of topics—modern updates to the marriage plot; fairy tale retellings in dystopian settings; stories of extrajudicial police killings and racial justice. The approaches are united, though, by a commitment to exploring the large-scale generic and theoretical structures at work in each set of texts. As a collection, Beyond the Blockbusters is an exciting entryway into a field that continues to grow and change even as its works captivate massive audiences. It will prove a crucial addition to the library of any scholar or instructor of young adult literature.

1

Exploring the Genre Conventions of the YA Dystopian Trilogy as Twenty-First-Century Utopian Dreaming

Rebekah Fitzsimmons

Young adult (YA) dystopian literature has been an inescapable feature of the YA book market since the beginning of the twenty-first century.¹ From the early 2000s, trilogies like The Hunger Games and Divergent have dominated the YA best-seller list, the box office, and many conversations about YA literature. This essay argues that the YA dystopian trilogy is a multibook storytelling formula that establishes a new form of twenty-first-century utopian writing. The historical didactic intent of utopian/dystopian literature as a form of societal critique combined with the pedagogical role of YA literature creates a new genre in the utopian/dystopian tradition that follows a three-book format. What’s more, as a growing number of trilogies conform to this emerging generic form, much as emerging utopian literature followed the form of Thomas More’s inaugural text, the lessons that encourage teens to think beyond (some) institutions are reinforced in readers’ minds and reinscribed on the subgenre through repetition. In examining the genre conventions and pedagogical strategies of YA dystopian trilogies, this essay outlines a helpful framework for analyzing the wide range of trilogies that exists within this subgenre, allowing scholars and students to move beyond the best-known trilogies in order to examine the utopian impulses of all these texts.

As noted in the introduction to this volume, YA literature is widely invested in teaching children about social forces and the ways in which institutions—church, government, school—reinforce more abstract social constructions like race, gender, and sexuality. Roberta Trites argues that teens are expected, even encouraged, to rebel against these limits, failing at inappropriate or childish forms of rebellion before locating the “institutionally tolerated form of rebellion that paradoxically allows them to remain within the system” (34). Rebellion is encouraged—possibly even required—in YA literature because it teaches protagonists (and, by extension, readers) how to find the limits of the institutions they must inhabit. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that YA literature has become so invested in dystopian worlds. Teenagers make natural protagonists for dystopian novels because they are expected to rebel and push boundaries, which is a necessary plot device for a dystopian narrative to perform its critical work. Stereotypically, teenagers feel that they are outcasts in society, that they are not understood, and that adult society is repressive, unfair, and built on outdated or arbitrary rules. Dystopian fiction magnifies those unjust, repressive elements and pushes them to the extreme, building a fictional world devoted to critiquing aspects of society that seem fundamental and unchangeable, and exposing the teen reader’s place in the real-world equivalent of that system.

History of YA Dystopias

Early examples of the YA/dystopia generic blend can be seen in novels from the late 1980s and 1990s; books like Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (1985) and The Giver by Lois Lowry (1993) play on traditional dystopian fears of overly structured societies and repressed free will, even while addressing typical teen fears about growing up, puberty, bullies, and high-stakes tests.² The rise of the twenty-first-century YA dystopian marketing juggernaut is often linked to the 2002 publication of M. T. Anderson’s novel Feed. Due in part to its status as a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature that year, Feed soon became a favorite of high school and college instructors as a critical dystopian text focused on technology, consumerism, and environmentalism.

Following Anderson, YA dystopian texts spent the next decade as the bestsellers du jour, thanks in no small part to the overwhelming success of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy (2008–2010). Collins popularized the trilogy format along with the YA dystopian subgenre, and the blockbuster series is credited with spawning a wide range of imitators. However, in tracing the genre conventions in trilogies published between 2005 and 2015, it is clear Collins was not the first to write in this three-book format.³ Much of the existing criticism of YA dystopian trilogies focuses on The Hunger Games and Divergent series; this essay outlines the genre conventions that apply broadly to YA dystopian trilogies but uses the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness as the analytical focus.⁴

In mapping out this generic metanarrative on a broader scale, I demonstrate that these novels represent not just a teen fad but a broader cultural moment and an emerging subgenre. These trilogies draw upon the literary traditions of critical utopian literature to create a space for (some) teen readers to imagine and potentially enact social change, even as the subgenre privileges that utopian dreaming for white, heteronormative, cisgendered, able-bodied characters. In chapter thirteen of this collection, S. R. Toliver’s essay clearly outlines the limitations of the YA dystopian subgenre in addressing the place of young people of color and queer youth in shaping and saving the future world(s). I acknowledge this limitation within the scope of my own argument and use it as an opportunity to call on teachers and scholars to engage with YA dystopian trilogies beyond the most common blockbuster series. I claim that the pedagogical strategies of these trilogies empower (some) teens to look beyond the obvious forces that shape their society to critically examine the limits placed upon them and to channel their (overwhelmingly white) teen rebellions into socially and politically impactful movements.

Utopian Traditions

While the utopian impulse existed in myths, legends, and religious reassurances that a more perfect world is possible, it was Thomas More who invented the word utopia to describe his carefully structured island society in 1516 (Elliott 3–24). Since the word is a play on the Greek, meaning both “the perfect or good place” and “no place,” “utopia necessarily wears a Janus-face. The portrayal of an ideal commonwealth has a double function: it establishes a standard, a goal; and by virtue of its existence alone it casts a critical light on society as presently constituted” (22). To narrate an alternative world that improves on reality is to suggest that reality is imperfect but improvable. In the midst of the industrial era, modern warfare, and the ruthless side of capitalism, John Stuart Mill coined the word dystopia in 1868 (Vieira 16). At the same time, the highly structured, proscriptive utopias of More’s tradition shifted toward the futuristic, borrowing elements from science fiction and apocalyptic narratives to articulate fears about the growing role of science in creating weapons of mass destruction, surveillance technologies, medical advancements, mechanized labor, eugenics, and climate change (Clayes 115–22). The twentieth century led to an understanding that one man’s utopia, such as Hitler’s Aryan nation, was other men’s and women’s dystopian nightmare; as such, dystopias of different eras often reflect the general fears of that time (108–22).

The generic qualities of dystopias reflect a few specific criteria. Like a utopia, a dystopia often exists in an isolated or insulated place, separated from other societies either by space (an island, a distant planet) or political reality (wars, closed borders, censored communication technologies). Dystopias detail the social structure, governing body, and daily life of an isolated society in a way that invites comparison to the reader’s contemporary society, which Darko Suvin refers to as “cognitive estrangement” (Metamorphoses 4). Unlike utopias, dystopias are described by insiders, since visitors are generally not allowed into these closed-off societies (Moylan 148). The protagonist often harbors outsider feelings, as a result of either tragic circumstances or an encounter with a knowledgeable individual or rebellious figure who exists outside full control of the dystopian society. Since the protagonist cannot unsee the truth of the injustices or hypocrisies that the outsider has revealed, these insider narratives allow the reader to identify with the protagonist “by means of the thoughts and feelings of the characters in that new society who are involved in the daily struggle to build a world of human freedom and self-fulfillment” (Fitting 148).

Just like utopian fiction, dystopian novels have at their heart a pedagogical mission; critical utopias and dystopias use the genre as a space from which to criticize the author’s own world in order to encourage change (Moylan 186–94). While dystopias are often considered bleak stories filled with dark nightmares built on the most pessimistic vision of human nature, more-contemporary dystopian narratives are not without a spark of hope or the promise of escape. They are meant to provoke fear and dread in the reader in order to spark the “utopian hope” that will impel the reader to seek a better way forward. “[D]ystopias that leave no room for hope do in fact fail in their mission” (Vieira 17). The goal of these “critical dystopias” “is to make man realize that, since it is impossible for him to build an ideal society, then he must be committed to the construction of a better one … they are, in fact a variant of the same social dreaming that gives impetus to utopian literature” (17). Building on this argument, I locate the YA dystopian trilogy within this critical dystopian tradition and argue that these trilogies paint rebellion as heroic and celebrate the disruption of corrupt systems, through violence if necessary. Therefore, unlike the lessons Trites identifies in school fictions, these YA texts advocate for the overthrow of existing institutions within the dystopian systems in favor of a more perfect society.

Mapping the Genre Conventions of YA Dystopian Trilogies

By identifying the YA dystopian trilogy as a distinct subgenre and mapping its phases, it becomes easier to see the common pedagogical strategies and didactic missions of these texts.

After analyzing over a dozen YA dystopian trilogies, I have determined that this subgenre has three phases.⁵

Phase 1 establishes the rules and realities of the dystopian world and places the protagonist in direct conflict with that system through a ritualized rite of passage symbolizing coming of age.⁶ Phase 2 expands the world of the dystopia beyond the protagonist’s home to show that the protagonist’s problems are only a small part of the larger dysfunctional system; given the size and scope of these inequities, conflict with the ruling forces of the dystopia becomes inevitable. Phase 3 forces alliances to shift as new forces (re)appear to realign the balance of power; these forces often demonstrate alternative societal structures that appear to offer an alternative to the status quo. At the heart of the rebellion, the protagonist makes difficult choices that often result in self-sacrifice, in order to overthrow the ruling forces and defeat the main antagonist. Each trilogy then concludes with a gesture toward Ernst Bloch’s “utopian hope,” where society begins to reassemble itself, moving toward more-democratic, justice-oriented structures.

Phase 1: Rules and Realities

Like most speculative fiction, each YA dystopian trilogy is built around “a strange newness, a novum,” or a specific element that marks where the dystopian system has deviated from our own (Suvin, Metamorphosis 4). This estranging principle often serves as the hook for the trilogy’s marketing (such as The Hunger Games’s premise of “in a world where children fight to the death on TV”) and affects the shape of the trilogy’s plot and social critique. The resulting “cognitive estrangement” transforms the remaining recognizable elements of everyday life into the unusual or foreign, which Suvin argues allows the reader to view our own society with fresh eyes (Metamorphosis 10). In The Knife of Never Letting Go (Knife), the first book in the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness, Todd lives on a distant planet where a native “germ” causes the thoughts of all men to be audible and visible. Todd describes this phenomenon, called “Noise,” as:

a flood let loose right at me, like a fire, like a monster the size of the sky come to get you cuz there’s nowhere to run … Never mind plugging yer ears, it don’t help at all … the voices talking and moaning and singing and crying. There’s pictures too pictures that come to yer mind in a rush, no matter how much you don’t want ’em, pictures of memories and fantasies and secrets and plans and lies, lies, lies. (20–21)

This estranging principle of Noise has created an utter lack of inner privacy, and the resulting panoptic atmosphere has driven the all-male settlement of Prentisstown to cultlike behavior, alcohol abuse, and violence. Additionally, the pages of the text explode with alternative fonts and text sizes that push beyond the typical margins in a visual representation of Noise, estranging the reader from the traditional visual expectations of a novel.

Phase 1 begins by focusing on a particular subset of society, the home of the protagonist. This allows the reader to become immersed in the world of the dystopia and to understand the rules and realities of the society through the focus of the protagonist. These subsets, like Panem’s District 12 or Divergent’s Dauntless faction, serve as miniaturized examples of the dystopian system. In Knife, Prentisstown (we’re told) is the last surviving settlement on New World, consisting of 146 men; supposedly, all of the women and most of the men died in the war with the native species, the Spackle.

The motivating action of Phase 1 is a ritualized rite of passage, where the dystopian system initiates the protagonist’s transition from childhood to adulthood through proscribed practices. Though the protagonist is a part of the dystopian system, he or she often feels pushed to the margins as a result of personal circumstances. At the start of Knife, Todd, the only boy remaining in Prentisstown, is isolated by rules that forbid men from speaking to boys. Todd flees the settlement before turning thirteen, when the ritual is scheduled to take place. During his flight he learns that this ritual entails hearing a version of the true history of the town and being made complicit in that history (397). The real reason there are no women in Prentisstown is that human women are unaffected by Noise, and so the men, led by Mayor Prentiss, killed them all thirteen years earlier. After the mass murder, Mayor Prentiss ritualized the process of coming of age so that the “way that a boy in Prentisstown becomes a man … It’s by killing another man. All by theirselves” (448). Like the rites of passage in other dystopian novels, such as the faction selection in Divergent or surviving the Reaping and the Hunger Games, this ritual marker of adulthood initiates the coming-of-age process, ultimately leading the young men in Prentisstown to become full participants in the dystopian system. Surviving the coming-of-age process requires the young adult protagonists to navigate their own loss of innocence or ignorance as to the form and function of their society, while the dystopian structure drives them toward becoming complicit in upholding the dystopian system in which they live. The choices each protagonist makes to accept or disrupt different steps in the ritualized rites of passage shape the conflict with th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction. Boom! Goes the Hypercanon: On the Importance of the Overlooked and Understudied in Young Adult Literature
• Section 1. Defining Boundaries
• Section 2. Expanding Boundaries
• Section 3. Revealing Boundaries
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors