ENGL 335 Seminar in Young Adult Literature
This course is designed to situate students in the critical conversation surrounding Young Adult Literature: when did it appear as a genre, who were/are the critical players, what are the major themes, literary devices, and motifs that define YA lit., who should be reading it, what is the value of reading it, and what is its place in the literary canon? As such, we will examine texts that provide a historical perspective, such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, alongside contemporary texts, such as Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give and Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park, to explore the debates surrounding this increasingly popular genre and to challenge the criteria that establish texts as young adult literature and the assumptions about the genre itself.