YA Matters.

IN a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Young Adult Literature (YA) was put on blast for being too dark. This is all rooted in a conservative approach to controlling children, molding them into good little consumers. They are afraid to let the world be written about the way it actually is for some people. The problem is that people think a single book is a representative sample of the world, which is not true. People need to keep in mind that fiction has an agenda. Someone is trying to use.. a parable if you will.. to illustrate some point. The fact that the books feature serious themes, difficult for people to read about. YA functions as a form of catharsis for both people who suffer from serious social and emotional issues, and others who suffer from the banality of a middle-class consumer driven existence where helicopter parents interfere to the extent that they have made you co-dependent. This is a reality that the same helicopter parents want to deny exists.. because it maintains the status quo.

Calling the themes in YA dark adds another stigma to the literature. Creating the binary difference between light and dark, and qualifying each by equating light with good, and dark with bad, plants the seed of discrimination, and teaches future generations to place everyone they meet in hierarchies based on social privilege.

Although we must concede that the protest will never end because the self-righteous will maintain that God is on their side, and He would be appalled by the stories being read by young adults, even though the Bible has moments that include mutilation, suffering, betrayal; many of the themes that appear in the YA genre of contemporary rendition of the Western Judeo-Christian story.

We can not deny that the issues in these so-called “problem novels” do not exist. At the same time, we ought not give such a special emphasis to them as to elevate them to a form of sanctioned escapism—condoning cutting, suicide, gang-violence, etc. We should take no special note of them other than to acknowledge their existence so as not to bask in the bliss of ignorance. We must avoid the mindset of everything good is light, everything bad is dark, good is beautiful, bad is ugly, and so on. If that is the convention that you want, then I would suggest ignoring the YA genre altogether, and head on over to Disney.com.

Besides the fact that young people are reading in the age of no attention span, these books bring a little comfort to a small group of people who would otherwise be alone. YA serves as an emotional prosthetic, and it would be cruel to withhold both the opportunity to improve ones mind and imagination, but also to feel that perhaps other people experience such despair.

If parents with “taste” and “judgment” want to maintain the façade that the world does possess the kind of complicity and hardship as presented in these novels, they are only deluding themselves, and missing out on important parental aspects such as preparing children for the inevitable headache that is the adult world. I think the real problem is that these people have a problem with truth. They don’t want to hear the truth, they just want to hold on to their delusions as though they were reality, but in fact they are just becoming subjects to a system that labels and segregates people into stratified groups in vain efforts to shield youth for the fact that the world isn’t the Disney fairy tale we’ve been absorbing through the television-based culture they’ve been bred into.

Perhaps that is the true issue. More young adults are reading, and so less are watching trashy TV, playing less violent video games. This is causing the stock holders to lose money, so they get articles in the WSJ to convince conservative parents to encourage their children to read less and watch more television.

It may not be censorship to withhold information from a child until it is a certain age, but it is not protection either.

But don’t listen to me, read for yourself and more importantly, think for yourself:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303657404576357622592697038.html?mod=WSJ_Books_LS_Books_6

NPR response:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/06/06/137005354/seeing-teenagers-as-we-wish-they-were-the-debate-over-ya-fiction