Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity (review)

Robyn McCallum. Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999

Robyn McCallum's most recent book is part of Garland Publishing's series on children's literature and culture, as was her previous book (written with John Stephens). This by itself speaks well of Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction. Of the five books in the series that I have read to date, not one is less than excellent.

McCallum's book follows Maria Nikolajeva's Children's Literature Comes of Age in the Garland series as a critical treatment of literature for young people using a Bakhtinian approach; however, McCallum's book focuses exclusively on the examination of "the representation of dialogic conception of subjectivity in adolescent and children's fiction" (3). McCallum is "centrally concerned with the images of selfhood that these fictions offer their readers, especially the interactions between selfhood, social and cultural forces, ideologies, and other selves" (4). In fact, McCallum's book is easily the most thorough and focused examination of Bakhtin's theories of novelistic discourse in literature for the young. Nikolajeva's and McCallum's books make excellent reading in tandem: the former excels in range while the latter is brilliant in its close readings of a more narrowly focused genre.

Early in the book, McCallum makes it clear that she isn't going to provide a general survey of the theory of subjectivity, though I think she does a remarkable job of providing an introduction to humanist and post-humanist conceptions and deconstructions of the subject. In fact, the real strength of this book is the way the author manages to intersect the strands of subjectivity, narrativity, dialogism, and adolescent fiction. I would have liked to have seen more on the theory and (at least a contingent) definition of adolescent literature, however. The observation that "Bakhtinian and Lacanian theories are relevant to . . . [and] have a particular pertinence to adolescent fiction" (7) comes in a chapter whose third endnote makes the following disclaimer: "There is not space here to examine issues such as what constitutes the category 'adolescent fiction,' and whether it does or does not exist" (20). McCallum does provide something of a definition through the intersection of dialogism and adolescent fiction when she observes that, "adolescent fiction has in common with Bakhtinian writings a predominant concern with the relations between the self and others, and the influence of society, culture and language on cognition and maturation" (10). While I credit McCallum with not getting caught in the trap of trying to provide an exhaustive theoretical history of each strand in her multi-stranded discussion, the nature of adolescent fiction as the body of work under discussion is the strand least pursued and most taken for granted. It seems ironic that a book-length study that employs the theory of dialogism should leave its area of study defined as monologically as that which "has been classified and marketed for high school-aged people (ages 12-17)" (20). To be fair, however, I think anyone writing about dialogism in scholarly form almost necessarily falls prey to the irony of having to present that material monologically; I think we should be grateful, ultimately, that McCallum's text on dialogism is as masterfully dialectical as it is.

Actually, despite the wonderful synthesis of theories and texts that McCallum's book provides, Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction does have a dialogic quality to the arrangement of the chapters and subjects: issues are never left once and for all, and they return in new contexts. The introductory chapter sets up the important theoretical contexts for the study. The relationships among subjectivity, humanistic ideology, and children's literature are explored here and are followed by the establishment of Bakhtin's (and to a lesser extent, Lacan's, Vygotsky's, Iser's, and Althusser's) concepts central...