Adolescence and Young Adult Literature : Reflections on Literary Education and Books for Young Readers

Young Adult Literature (YAL) is one of the most relevant publishing and media phenomena of the new century. This specific form of literature, which some scholars now consider as a distinct genre (Trites, 2000; Chambers, 2020), is increasingly expanding throughout the world, interweaving with different languages, in particular cinema. In its best examples, YAL manages to reveal not­so-­obvious sides of the adolescent mind, shedding light on opacity, silence, incomprehensible aspects of adolescence. Aidan Chambers, Philip Ridley, John Green, Gary Paulsen, Margaret Mahy and Robert Westall, to name some of the most successful and critically acclaimed authors of the genre, have created philosophically as well as pedagogically enlightening metaphors of adolescence (Trites, 2014), exploring/exposing the secret selves of their teenage characters, who in most cases experience a transcendental spiritual moment, a real epiphany, which explains the peculiar and crucial place adolescence has in human life. Whereas initiation rites have now disappeared in the Western world (Aime, Pietropolli Charmet, 2014), high quality YAL leads young characters – and readers with them – along initiatory paths, where they can withdraw in solitude, thereby satisfying their need of self­absorption and isolation from often indelicate and intrusive adults, and finally experience wild, disturbing, even deadly trials, which eventually mark their transition from youth to the adult world. Through this privileged use of metaphors, YAL can grasp traits of authenticity and allow an enlarged look capable of responding to the challenges of complexity. According to these premises, this study considers YAL as a key educational tool in secondary education, with the conviction that reading YAL – and all literature as a whole – can be, for the young, a powerful means of acquisition of self­awareness, a fundamental instrument of freedom and identity formation. Reading high quality YAL allows adolescents to meet their contradictions, difficulties and anxieties associated with growth, as well as their hopes and clever intuitions, thus offering them representations of their age which are different from the consolidated narrations of crisis and unease usually regarding adolescence. The aim of this study is therefore to discuss the need to include YAL books within secondary school curricula, which implies a reflection on the necessity to possibly develop a canon for YAL, while working, as a scientific community, on defining a poetics and aesthetics of the genre. My research also aims at investigating Flash Fiction (Chambers, 2011; Batchelor, King, 2014) as a possible genre for secondary school literary education. Short stories and very short stories could be considered as fundamental structures/steps for students to access further readings, engaging them with agile yet complete literary artworks which adapt to new media and seem to be the literary form in which young people express themselves naturally. These “bridge” texts, if semantically and poetically intense, could act as mentor stories leading students in the broad universe of literature, thereby laying the foundation for the construction of a divergent thinking, essential basis on which to develop fundamental human qualities, such as critical thinking, creative imagination, introspection, and empathy (Wolf, 2018).