Great Despair Meets Hopeful: Kristevan Readings in Adolescent Fiction (review)

Since the dearth of genuinely theoretical reflection on Young Adult literature was noted by Caroline Hunt in 1996, several book-length studies have appeared on the subject. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature, by Roberta Seelinger Trites, provides a lively and comprehensive Foucauldian account of the mechanisms and effects of power that an adolescent must confront on his or her way to adulthood. Robyn McCallum's Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity employs the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to investigate the ways adolescents both resist and are interpellated by the authoritative discourses of their culture. Most recently, Great Despair Meets Hopeful: Kristevan Readings in Adolescent Fiction, by Martha Westwater, is concerned with the adolescent's neverending creation and recreation of the self, that is, with the persistence of hope in the face of sadness and despair, as it is articulated through the theory of Julia Kristeva.

Kristeva seems uniquely suited for the study of adolescent fiction, because, as Westwater notes, she contends that "the novelistic genre itself is largely tributary to the 'adolescent' economy of writing" (11). That is, the novel as a formal genre has always been concerned with the writing-subject (Kristeva's word for author) and the reading-subject as open systems, works-in-progress, which are in turn specific traits of adolescent identity. And while the adolescent may "mirror...the malaise of our society" (11), Kristeva believes that literature can have the distinct therapeutic effect of moving us away from narcissism, through despair, and on to the love and hope that comes from embracing alterity within ourselves. Thus, "Kristevan theory favours life and engenders hope" (xviii), characteristics that Westwater also finds, through her Kristevan readings, in the books that she studies.

Westwater selects six award-winning but controversial authors and pairs them with specific Kristevan concepts in order to extend (and sometimes explode) the usual "common sense" readings of their works in the direction of a hope that she finds implicit in each. For example, she shows how the semiotic valuation of nature and spirituality makes itself heard within, through, and against the symbolic in the works of Patricia Wrightson. Kristeva's concept of the chora as both liminal and healing maternal space emerges as a site of renewal for Kevin Major's characters who are caught in the breakdowns of familial and social relationships. Westwater locates abjection, "that fundamental, necessary, unrepresentable moment of separation from the mother's body in which subjectivity is first structured and then destabilized" in the novels of Katherine Paterson (65). The role of love in the passage through adolescent melancholy and depression is beautifully demonstrated through the works of Aidan Chambers. Robert Cormier's work is read through the Kristevan lens of monumental time and the necessity of forgiveness. Jan Mark is shown, like Kristeva, to celebrate the chimerical nature of the subject-in-process. Finally, Westwater ends with a discussion of the "felt time" of the imagination each writer displays, which has the power to "offset the disappointments of present reality" (165). Each of the chapters moves delicately and dexterously through both the novels and the theory, crafting subtle readings that are compelling in their elegance and their profoundly moral vision. Westwater's rigorous engagement with difficult material and difficult theory clearly demonstrates something that I can only call love throughout this book—love for the literature and love for its intended audience.

If I were to have a caution for readers of the book it would be located in the desire we sometimes have for ready detachability. That is, Westwater's own engagement with Kristevan thought is so deep and broad, and her understandings and explanations of the various concepts that I have sketched above are so embedded in the readings of particular texts, that it would be difficult for a person new to or unfamiliar with Kristeva to separate the two. Thus, the virtuosity with which Westwater offers her readings seems singular and perhaps...