This will be the tenth and final blog entry for EDU 320. It's been an interesting semester, full of "big ideas" and really fun discussions. In the spirit of "wrapping things up" I am to talk about the book that had the most significant impact on me over the course of the semester. While I will say that I learned things from all the books we read, whether I enjoyed them or not, the book that I still think about often, the book that I found the most astonishing and beautiful, has to be Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret.
This book really made me re-think many things about how stories are told--I firmly believe that Selznick's approach is unique. Furthermore, the perfect intersection of form and content is something I will take with me to aid in my own creative endeavors. To write a story about a boy who falls in love with books and silent movies, in the form of a half book-half "movie," is so satisfying. The form and content of the book are indistinguishable, fully integrated. In that way, it is like a poem--a sustained poetic expression disguised as a children's book.
The way that all of Selznick's interests, from early movies, to automatrons, to magic, to clocks, to Paris, all come together is as magical as the automatron's squiggles forming an image. The fact that readers, especially children, can follow his associative leaps and imagery (again, the terms of poetry seem to fit perfectly) just shows the deftness of his craft work. The book is a metaphor for itself--it is brilliantly conceived.
But more than that? It is beautiful. It is unexpected. It is original.
I think I tend to devalue the current children's literary creations as being "not as good as what I grew up with"--but this book threw all that out of the window. If I learned nothing else in this class, it is that great artists and writers are still working towards children's literature. For a few writers, at least, artistic integrity is still more important than marketing. To sum up--this book gave me hope.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Friday, April 10, 2009
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie, was one of the best books we've read this semester, by far. It was a heartbreaking and really funny story of a boy living on a reservation, who decides to go to school off reservation lands, where he is the only Native American--making him an outcast in both worlds. The insight into Native American lives was staggering--definitely a look at a culture that mainstream America has been trying to ignore, successfully, for over two hundred years.
The concept of intertextuality, a cultural studies mechanism for analyzing literature based on its place within literature, genre-wise, and in specific allusions to other texts, applies to Alexie's novel in many ways. First though, the most moving line in the novel, for me, was a reference to the opening of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The speaker in Alexie's novel begs to differ--he says that on the reservation every family is unhappy, and it is for the same reason: alcohol. This claim is proven again and again with heartbreaking clarity throughout the novel.
But on a more "general" level, Alexie's novel is working within a multitude of genres, making its intertextual ties complicated indeed. The novel is marketed as a young adult novel, and it certainly has much to do with books about teenage protagonists coming-of-age, dealing with society's problems, aspiring to be more than their parents. It also fits in with Native American literature, determined to showcase the positives and negatives--the realities--of life as a "Part Time Indian." It is also a confessional work, within the "diary" tradition of writing, ala Sylvia Plath. On that same note, it is a semi-autobiographical novel for Alexie's real life--always an interesting study. Then, through the narrator's art work it also plays with the comic book tradition, through both traditional cartoons of characters and beautiful sketches hastily taped into the book's pages.
That The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian lies at the juncture of so many traditions is not what makes it incredible. However, the fact that it can use references to each of those traditions and tap into all the connotative associations inherent in them, DOES. Alexie uses all the genres that come together in his novel for its own enrichment. The reader falls into the rich, intertextual web of the book, and then emerges hours later, astonished by the wealth found within its "YA" covers.
The concept of intertextuality, a cultural studies mechanism for analyzing literature based on its place within literature, genre-wise, and in specific allusions to other texts, applies to Alexie's novel in many ways. First though, the most moving line in the novel, for me, was a reference to the opening of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The speaker in Alexie's novel begs to differ--he says that on the reservation every family is unhappy, and it is for the same reason: alcohol. This claim is proven again and again with heartbreaking clarity throughout the novel.
But on a more "general" level, Alexie's novel is working within a multitude of genres, making its intertextual ties complicated indeed. The novel is marketed as a young adult novel, and it certainly has much to do with books about teenage protagonists coming-of-age, dealing with society's problems, aspiring to be more than their parents. It also fits in with Native American literature, determined to showcase the positives and negatives--the realities--of life as a "Part Time Indian." It is also a confessional work, within the "diary" tradition of writing, ala Sylvia Plath. On that same note, it is a semi-autobiographical novel for Alexie's real life--always an interesting study. Then, through the narrator's art work it also plays with the comic book tradition, through both traditional cartoons of characters and beautiful sketches hastily taped into the book's pages.
That The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian lies at the juncture of so many traditions is not what makes it incredible. However, the fact that it can use references to each of those traditions and tap into all the connotative associations inherent in them, DOES. Alexie uses all the genres that come together in his novel for its own enrichment. The reader falls into the rich, intertextual web of the book, and then emerges hours later, astonished by the wealth found within its "YA" covers.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
The Giver
I would say that The Giver by Lois Lowry is one of the greatest young adult novels of all time. It is as perceptive and alarming as its compatriots in distopian literature, and as heartbreaking and uplifting as its fellow bildungsroman. The book works on so many levels, and has not become dated in recent years, as many once revolutionary works of YA fiction (Judy Blume comes to mind) have.
There are definitely a few scenes that I think will stay with me for the next five years (and have stayed with me for the previous 10, since I first read the novel). Firstly, the scene of the 12 year olds receiving their assignments. To know exactly what you will do for the rest of your life, decided by someone else, and be utterly happy with it is still kind of a fantasy of mine. Unfortunately, real life doesn't work that way, and I'm sure I would not be satisfied even if it did. Still, I can feel that anxiety of that scene in my bones. It is an incredible evocation.
The other, and I still remember reading this scene when I was ten years old, is when Jonas's father kills the baby twin who weighs less. I remember this, not for the horror which ensued after reading about his calm injection into the baby's forehead, but because I realized immediately that I did not hate him for what he had done. It was at that point in my life that I realized the difference between people who do not know what they are doing, and those who are accountable for their actions. Jonas's father knew physically what he was doing, and yet because of his society he is not culpable--has no real knowledge of the relative worth of life and death.
Books like The Giver impact lives, if read when one is most receptive to them. That is the greatest power of YA literature, I think--its incredible effect on the sponges that pick it up. I remember being a little sponge, my whole world rocked by every good book I picked up...and I thank Lowry for teaching me something that, at least in a small way, shaped my view of the world.
There are definitely a few scenes that I think will stay with me for the next five years (and have stayed with me for the previous 10, since I first read the novel). Firstly, the scene of the 12 year olds receiving their assignments. To know exactly what you will do for the rest of your life, decided by someone else, and be utterly happy with it is still kind of a fantasy of mine. Unfortunately, real life doesn't work that way, and I'm sure I would not be satisfied even if it did. Still, I can feel that anxiety of that scene in my bones. It is an incredible evocation.
The other, and I still remember reading this scene when I was ten years old, is when Jonas's father kills the baby twin who weighs less. I remember this, not for the horror which ensued after reading about his calm injection into the baby's forehead, but because I realized immediately that I did not hate him for what he had done. It was at that point in my life that I realized the difference between people who do not know what they are doing, and those who are accountable for their actions. Jonas's father knew physically what he was doing, and yet because of his society he is not culpable--has no real knowledge of the relative worth of life and death.
Books like The Giver impact lives, if read when one is most receptive to them. That is the greatest power of YA literature, I think--its incredible effect on the sponges that pick it up. I remember being a little sponge, my whole world rocked by every good book I picked up...and I thank Lowry for teaching me something that, at least in a small way, shaped my view of the world.
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