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  • Technology and Identity in Young Adult Fiction: The Posthuman Subject by Victoria Flanagan
  • Maija-Liisa Harju
Flanagan, Victoria. Technology and Identity in Young Adult Fiction: The Posthuman Subject. Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature Series. Palgrave: Macmillan, 2014.

With Technology and Identity in Young Adult Fiction: The Posthuman Subject, Victoria Flanagan encourages readers to stop wallowing in the fear-mongering of popular dystopian young adult novels and discover new stories that represent young people’s engagements with technology as a positive step in human evolution. In her book, the author discusses familiar titles such as Ender’s Game, Feed, The Hunger Games, Uglies and Little Brother but also highlights lesser known novels (e.g., The Silver Metal Lover, Eyelash: A Blog Novel, serafina67, and “Anda’s Game”) that are appearing alongside the plethora of “anti-tech” dystopias produced for youth today.

Flanagan suggests that, by highlighting the ways technology can “enhance and deepen our understanding of what it means to be human in the modern era” (187), new young adult literature supports posthumanism as a necessary, contemporary discourse. Emerging authors, she states, are exploring the many ways youth construct identity through their use of the internet socially (e.g., through computing, gaming, social networking, and blogging) and the ways they connect technologies and bodies (e.g., through cyborg narratives, use of avatars, and online explorations of sexuality). More importantly, new narratives also represent young people as knowledgeable and complicit agents in their engagement with the internet. Flanagan supports her [End Page 84] arguments with interdisciplinary theories and focuses on themes such as youth and digital citizenship (Chapter 3), technology, female subjectivity and embodiment (Chapter 4), and surveillance societies (Chapter 5). In chapters 2 and 6, she also draws attention to the ways authors reflect posthumanism through changing narrative strategies (e.g., using cyborg narrators) and formats (e.g., producing “technorealist” novels that reflect/mimic the linguistic codes of online media engagement).

The first chapter begins with a necessary discussion of competing posthumanist philosophies in order to identify Flanagan’s use of terms. While this opening distinguishes critical ideas and provides context for her application of posthumanist theory to youth literature, it is a challenging read hampered by a highly specialized discourse that may deter readers, especially those whose first language is not English. Greater use of plain-language to explain complex concepts, and editing for repetition, would have made the chapter more coherent and accessible to a wider audience. In this introductory chapter, Flanagan also neglects to explain her use of the term “virtual reality.” This is a significant oversight, as she employs it throughout the book to refer generally to cyberspace (e.g., “Identifying an emerging trend in children’s literature—blogging and chat-room narratives—this chapter explores the positive social effects of virtual reality in these contexts, particularly for young girls, where online communities offer support and encouragement” [9]). Because critical and popular use of the term most often reflects Jaron Lanier’s (1987) specification of “virtual reality” as a technology that creates 3D simulated, immersive environments and not just any online space, Flanagan’s substitution of the term for cyberspace or the internet is consistently confusing.

This reader most appreciated Chapters 3, 4, and 5, which are more succinct, offer engaging readings of lesser known novels related to youth and technology, and tackle issues that have not been widely addressed in children’s literature criticism to this point. Chapter 3, for example, explores what it means for a young person to be a ‘digital citizen’ in the context of children and young adult’s real world rights and freedoms. Here, Flanagan compares the bleak oppression of Ender’s Game with new narratives (e.g., Little Brother and Ready Player One) that offer youth of the future possibilities for agency, activism, and community in their engagements with technology.

In Chapter 4, Flanagan considers the ways technology can transform and extend female physicality through the examination of cyborg stories (e.g., Silver Metal Lover) and narratives that examine girls’ connections with their bodies both online and in real spaces. The author’s discussion of “Anda’s Game,” for example, seems particularly relevant at a time where...

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