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  • Saussure, Sex, and Socially Challenged Teens:A Polyphonic Analysis of Adolescent Fiction
  • Michelle H. Martin (bio)
Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature, by Roberta Seelinger Trites. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000.

Roberta Seelinger Trites's new critical text, Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature, arose out of Trites's dismay with the dearth of rigorous criticism in young adult (YA) literature. Firmly situated within poststructural theoretical discourse, Disturbing the Universe does the kind of challenging intellectual work with adolescent literature that Trites asserts is still largely missing from American teacher education programs and therefore from high school English classes. Trites makes the bold statement that postmodern theory is a particularly appropriate lens for examining YA texts because this genre "emerged from postmodern thinking" (18), and accordingly, she uses postmodern theory to scrutinize contemporary texts as recent as Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat books (1989-95) and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999). Taking a further step, though, she uses this postmodern lens for examining YA texts as early as Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868, 1869) and Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs (1912). If, as Trites suggests, postmodern thinking evolved long before the dawn of postmodernity, then this approach is indeed appropriate. Although readers may feel as skeptical as I did about Trites's applying postmodern theory to nineteenth-century texts, she justifies her approach with the light she sheds on these early texts.

Given the breadth of YA texts—both primary and critical—that Trites discusses, Disturbing the Universe offers an excellent introduction to YA critical discourse for those new to teaching and studying YA literature, yet it also gives those who have long been working in this field some new analytical perspectives to consider. Despite the fact that well-written YA and multicultural YA literature have been available for several decades, many American high school administrators [End Page 215] still place Beowulf, Hamlet and The Scarlet Letter on required reading lists to the exclusion of the literature composed specifically for YA readers. Inclusive in scope, Trites's multicultural and eclectic approach embraces canonical YA writers like Twain, Alcott, Hinton, and Cormier, but also others, such as Crescent Dragonwagon, Lawrence Yep, Jacqueline Woodson, Rosa Guy, Amy Tan, and Walter Dean Myers. The polyphony that abounds in Disturbing the Universels, I would argue, the most impressive aspect of Trites's second critical book and the aspect that will make this text useful to a wide variety of readers.

As suggested by the "Power and Repression" in its title, Disturbing the Universe takes a primarily Foucauldian approach. But even in defining the terminology that she will use throughout the book, she sets up a miniature version of Burke's parlor: she takes the ways that Max Weber, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucalt, Judith Butler, Marilyn French, and Jacques Lacan use the term "power," then makes use of appropriate pieces of all of these theories to construct her own definition: "Power is a force that operates within the subject and upon the subject in adolescent literature; teenagers are repressed as well as liberated by their own power and by the power of the social forces that surround them in these books. Much of the genre is thus dedicated to depicting how potentially out-of-control adolescents can learn to exist within institutional structures" (7). In a similar fashion, Trites also problematizes and clarifies the generic terms "adolescent literature," "YA literature," Bildungsroman (a novel of development in which the protagonist grows into adulthood), and Entwicklungsroman (a novel of mere growth). If I had been the least bit unclear in the introduction about why Trites expends so much effort distinguishing between the Bildungsroman and Entwicklungsroman, I had little doubt once I read her explanation in chapter 2 of why Adam Farmer's lack of power in Robert Cormier's I Am the Cheese makes this book an Entwicklungsroman: "Access to discourse both endangers Adam and saves him from the American government . . . as long as he is caught in this dynamic, he cannot become an adult" (27).This book could therefore not possibly be a Bildungsroman. Despite having taught...

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