Professional Journal Articles and the Novels they Illuminate: A Resource for YAL Courses

Articles related to young adult literature are currently many in number and wide in the range of topics they cover. They can be used by teachers in a number of ways: to gain a deeper understanding of and appreciation for a novel; to consider specific issues related to novel; to learn about strategies for teaching; to connect literary theory and the classroom. For someone teaching a young adult literature methods on the college or university level, it is entirely possible to construct a syllabus from the body of articles in The ALAN Review alone, and there are many other journals that focus on young adult literature, as well. For this column, I selected journal articles that feature young adult novels and, in the commentary, cover a topic of importance in the teaching of adolescent literature: theory, social issues, history, exposition, practice. The column is divided by the novels under consideration, and each segment contains a summary of the novel, a summary of the accompanying article, as well as information about the journal and the article topics.

Park's Quest, by Katherine Paterson

This is the story of Parkington Waddell Broughton the Fifth (AKA Park), whose father died in Vietnam when he was three months old. While Park was growing up, his mother talked very little about his father, and when Park would inquire, she relied on the cliched response, "You're too young to understand." When Park reaches adolescence, and it becomes clear that he is still "too young to understand," he begins to take his quest for information matters into his own hands. When he hears about the dedication ceremony for the Vietnam Memorial, and learning his mother will not attend or take him, he goes himself. The experience of touching his father's name etched on the Wall only spurs him on to learn more about his father. Buoyed by remembrances of the Arthurian legends that captured his imagination at school, his journey begins with a trip to his father's home in southwest Virginia. The rest of the book tells the tale of his personal quest and its unforeseen conclusion.

Article: "Validating the Personal in Katherine Paterson's Park's Quest,' by Robert Lockhart. The ALAN Review (See inside front cover of this issue for information.) (Full citations are provided in the reference list at the end of this column.)"

Topics: A transactional theory of reading; pedagogical implications

Summary: Robert Lockhart's article provides readers with an excellent foundation for understanding a transactional theory of reading. Lockhart does this by first explicating the theory and then by illustrating it with Park's Quest. His is the first article I assign in my young adult literature methods class, and my goal of teaching pre-service teachers the nature and importance of transactional reading is made attainable through the description of Lockhart's own powerful transaction with the novel.

That Park's Quest would evoke a very personal response from Lockhart seems inevitable because his experiences so closely mirror Park's. Lockhart describes the day he and his mother watched the Marine Corps officers approach their house to tell them his father had been killed in Vietnam. And the feelings Park later experienced as he searched for information about his father were similar to Lockhart's as he looked through his mother's memorabilia for clues about his father's life. He and Park shared the same anger at their loss and confusion at the questions surrounding it. Most poignant is the double vision of Lockhart and Park, as Lockhart describes his reaction when he read about Park's trip to the Vietnam Memorial: "So when Park reached out to touch the wall, I was not dispassionately reading the story of someone to whom I could not relate. . . . As Park reached out and touch the black wall, my heart raced because my hand, too, was reaching out" (p. 12).

Lockhart's story deeply affects my students and me when we read and discuss it, but the point he makes with the story is no less powerful in its context: "When we enter the literary discussion of the novel as human beings, we can understand the personal nature of the event of reading" (p. 14). Without an understanding of the personal nature of reading, transactional theory cannot be appreciated, and a pedagogy informed by it impossible. If the meaning of literature is even in some part dependent on the reader, then our teaching will reflect the reader's importance. From that foundation, we can lead students to a deeper, more meaningful experience with literature.

I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This, by Jacqueline Woodson

Marie is the young adolescent narrator in this story of her brief but momentous friendship with Lena, a poor White classmate who is new to Marie's predominantly Black 8th grade class at Chauncey Middle School. At first seemingly opposite in ways beyond the color of their skin, the two girls form a bond based initially on the fact that neither of them has a mother living with them: Lena's died from breast cancer; Marie's left her and her father two years ago in what was clearly a state of depression and out of a desperate need, as her mother would say, to breathe. The death of Lena's mother put Lena at the mercy of her father, who began to abuse her sexually. When Marie's mother left, her father retreated into his grief and, though it is clear he still loves Marie and cares for her financial and physical needs, he distances himself emotionally from her, no longer hugging and kissing her as he did when she was a younger child. Thus, both girls suffer, not only from the loss of their mothers, but from the hurt and confusion caused by their fathers as well. Gradually, the friendship between Marie and Lena deepens as they get to know each other and begin to offer each other emotional support.