Introduction to Literature: Personal Accounts (I)

As part of this blog, I wanted to dedicate a small set of short entries that detail the personal experiences of graduate students within our department who have taught English 220: Introduction to Literature. My goal is to highlight how children's and young adult texts are used in these introductory courses and how matters surrounding childhood, adolescence, and development become integral to these courses.

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What I (Alexander Elliott) found interesting in my own course was the fact that adolescence and childhood were at the forefront of discussion quite frequently, thus reflecting how my teaching and research go hand-in-hand. My course is centered on the concept of love and the affective implications surrounding that subject across different forms of literature and genres. Also, my students went to twitter to share their insights about the readings on Twitter using #love220ae in their posts. 

1. What children's and young adult books or texts were included in the reading list for your course? How were these texts received by the students?

One of the genres that I introduced into my course was young adult literature as a whole, but more specifically queer YA novels and their history. I taught my students about how these narratives came up within YA literature with John Donovan's 1969 novel, I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip. Additionally, I explained the history of book materiality and the importance of book covers within YA literature. 

As a class, we read Benjamin Alire Sáenz's Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. With this novel many topics surround LGBTQ+ representation, Mexican-American identities, parental and familial influence on adolescents, and societal/cultural expectations were brought to the forefront of discussion.

Overall, my students were incredibly happy with the inclusion of this text because it engaged with complex subject matters, yet engaged them in a fun reading experience. They were interested in learning about how impactful and poignant the history of this genre truly is. Various students asked for more recommendations of this kind of literature, as well!

2. What other texts lended themselves to discuss childhood and adolescence in nuanced ways that were either unexpected or surprising?

I started the semester off with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and it was very interesting to see how the students discussed adolescence as a crucial part of the play without my prompting them to do so. Interestingly enough, other texts worked in a similar manner like McCarthy's The Road and Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, where both texts were great in discussing how conceptions of childhood were complicated within speculative narratives. This often led to discussing how maturity and development need not work in a linear manner.

Another text, Vaughan and Staples' graphic novel Saga, also highlighted childhood and development as quite complicated especially because of the science-fiction element. Morrison's Sula served as a great novel to examine how two characters develop from their childhood into their adulthood, in that it gave our class a more prolonged discussion of difficulties in growing up at as a marginalized person within a real-world society.

3. How does your class's theme carry over to the matters of childhood and adolescence?

An overarching idea that has connected the texts is just how impactful familial relationships are in affecting the children and adolescent characters' interactions--be it romantic or platonic. Often time, the family structure (or lack thereof) and the surrounding environment that affect the young characters, results in changing the extent to which they are able to foster productive forms of kinship. Therefore, these family relationships are represented as having a clear impact in the affective component of the characters' later relationships. Overall, love is an abstract idea that cannot be rigidly defined and when childhood and adolescence are introduced, my class found it interesting to see how these stages in development were impactful on the later representations of these characters.

-A. Elliott