"The Best of Both Worlds": Rethinking the Merit of Graphic Novels, Sean P. Connors

Sean Connors writes in response to two commonly held assumptions about the use of graphic novels in secondary literature classrooms.  The first assumption is that the use of graphic novels is simply a "means to an end," usually as a bridge for reluctant or struggling readers to eventually come to "better" literature.  Connors feels that graphic novels are seldom seen as works of literary merit on their own terms.  The second assumption Connors writes against is the idea that all students will enjoy reading graphic novels.

Connors devotes some space to a historical overview of comics, and debates over their use in English classrooms, from the 1940s on.  Connors uses articles from English Journal in the 1940s to show how comics, even at that time, were seen as a way to bring struggling readers to more valid, literary texts.  Connors's overall argument is that many graphic novels are worthy of literary merit; although I agree with him, his evidence is rather slim.  He quotes three high school students who praise the genre.  Connors also says that "educators routinely cite [graphic novels'] ability to foster self-reflection, initiate social change, promote tolerance, and stimulate the imagination" (67) as rationales, but does not give any direct quotes or examples of this.

Connors's second point, which I had not previously considered, is that many students are aware of the stigma attached to graphic novels, manga, or comics.  Connors encountered quite a bit of resistance to the idea of teaching graphic novels among his university-level pre-service teachers; they thought that graphic novels were childish (because they had pictures), did not promote reading because there was little text, and did not promote "critical thinking" (each of the three students mentioned this as a drawback, but it is unclear exactly what they meant by critical thinking).  Even more interesting though, were the attitudes Connors encountered from high school students who loved to read graphic novels.  He found that those students were reluctant to read graphic novels openly because they felt an attached social stigma.

Connors ends with a call for professional journals like the ALAN Review to generally promote the use of graphic novels, discuss their unique pedagogical challenges, review new graphic novels, and cull the graphic novels of most literary merit for the ALAN readership.   

This article raises the question for me, "What exactly is literary merit?"  Connors points out that [some] graphic novels should be seen as works of literary merit in their own right, not just as a bridge to something better (Actually, Bucky Carter, who I mentioned in my previous post, has a book called Building Literacy Connections with Graphic Novels: Page by Page, Panel by Panel, that uses graphic novels in conjunction with "classic literature" rather than on their own).  So what should the qualifications be?  Connors says that not all graphic novels have literary merit, so what makes a text "worth" reading and talking/writing about with 120 students?  My own answer would be a combination of thematic depth with thoughtful formal characteristics.  Graphic novels are not my genre of expertise, but I can speak to this a little bit.  Art Spiegelman's Maus, for example, which I did read with my students, is quite complex, which I think makes it worth unpacking as a group.  The story of the author's father, a Holocaust survivor, Maus on one level is a story about what happened during the Holocaust.  On another level, it is about the ways in which a traumatic experience can affect a family for generations.  Maus is about a father-son relationship.  Maus is about memory and repression and moving on, or not.  Maus is about a sometimes unreliable and sometimes unsympathetic narrator.  Maus also has layers of complex visual symbolism that make it, I think, "worthy" of that kind of a formalist literary analysis.  Of course, there is the symbolism of the animals - the Jews are drawn as mice and the Nazis as cats.  This symbolic relationship is easy for middle school students to understand.  There is also a recurring image of a fly throughout the book, evoking everything from an annoyance, a pest, to flies buzzing over dead bodies (I always thought of Emily Dickinson's poem, "I heard a fly buzz when I died").  In addition, you can also draw students' attention to the size or shape of panels at various points, connecting what is being said to how it is drawn. 

Connors, S. P.  (2010).  "'The Best of Both Worlds': Rethinking the Literary Merit of Graphic Novels.  ALAN Review; Vol. 37, Issue 3; ProQuest Education Journals. pg. 65-70.

Familiar Aliens: Science Fiction as Social Commentary, Elaine J. O'Quinn and Heather Atwell

Very apropos to our current unit on Feed, O'Quinn and Atwell provide additional rationales for teaching the dystopian genre of "techno-science" (their term for novels like Feed and Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion, which are both stories of current technology amplified and used for evil purposes).  This article is from an issue of the ALAN Review devoted to exploring all kinds of digital media and "new literacies," graphic novels in particular.  It is actually guest edited by an acquaintance of mine, James Bucky Carter, who was getting his PhD in English education at UVA while I was there getting my Master's and teaching certification.  He is now an assistant professor at University of Texas-El Paso, has been hugely successful with his career, and is the go-to-guy for graphic novels and YA lit.  (I linked to his blog above.)

Anyway, O'Quinn and Atwell advocate for reading newer "techno-science" dystopias, either in addition to or instead of, older science fiction like Frankenstein or H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds.  The authors argue that these techno-science dystopias are more relevant to the daily realities of students today, who are immersed in a digital world.  If a teacher's goal is to help students question the world around them, including ethical dilemmas stemming from technology use, The House of the Scorpion and Feed are both excellent choices.

The authors devote quite a lot of space to summarizing The House of the Scorpion and Feed; since we are reading Feed, I will briefly summarize only The House of the Scorpions (by Nancy Farmer - it's awesome - you should read it), and then summarize the authors' recommendations for using each book.  
The House of the Scorpion is set in a no-man's land between Mexico and the US.  The governments of both countries have come to a sinister agreement to solve the problem of illegal immigration.  The US agrees to turn a blind eye to drug cultivation in the no-man's land, and to ignore drug smuggling into America, because Mexico agrees to manage its own border and prevent any of its citizens from crossing into the US.  The owners of the drug "plantations" in the no-man's land take those who are caught trying to cross the border, and turn them into zombies slaves (called eejits) to work on the drug plantations.  Like this wasn't nightmarish enough, the extremely wealthy can clone themselves to have an available source for organ transplants (this is very similar to the plot of the 2005 film The Island).  The book is told from the point of view of a young boy, who the reader later finds out, (SPOILER ALERT - highlight text to read), is the clone of the drug lord running the plantation.      There are quite a few social issues brought up by the book: immigration for one (I think there is an intended comparison to the plantation-slave system of the American South, as well as the implication that the use of Mexican farm labor in America can be compared to that system), and the relationship between the US and Mexico's drug war (I might point out that drug cultivation is dependent on a willing consumer market).  As O'Quinn and Atwell point out, the book also asks questions about cloning, the use of human embryos, and just what makes a human a human? 

Feed brings up some similar issues of the ethics of technology use in human bodies.  The slaves on the drug plantations of Nancy Farmer's book are turned into zombies by putting computer chips in their heads to control them; Titus's feed is not so different.  His behavior is certainly controlled by the feed, though not to the extent of the eejits.  The authors call Feed's genre "cyberpunk" and compare it to Bladerunner and The Matrix.  Thoughts on this categorization??  (I am not sure about it.)  Other issues raised by Feed which I am sure will come up are in our discussion are an excess of consumerism, treatment of the environment (and the impact of both of those things on other countries), and an over-reliance on technology.

The authors suggest pairing these novels with older dystopias like 1984 (1949) or Brave New World (1932) to consider how those authors' visions of the future have come true, or not, and to speculate about the problems our students will encounter in their lifetimes, as well as potential solutions.

Finally, the authors also suggest connecting to the many dystopian films raising many of the same issues.  For example, WALL-E, appropriate for any group, depicts humans as having utterly destroyed the Earth and departed to spaceships where they can drink super-sized sodas and watch TV all day while sitting down.  Avatar might be another example most students are familiar with.

In my own experience, I have found the dystopian genre to be one of my favorites for using with middle school students because it allows for the discussion of so many deep issues through text that is accessible to students.  I never even feel guilty about watching a film because the discussion is so rich and multilayered.  For example, Avatar at its heart is a story of colonization, which is relevant to all kinds of texts that aren't even in the sci-fi genre (Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart, Cry the Beloved Country are a few that come to mind right away - plus, did anyone else notice the major parallel to the Pocahontas story going on in Avatar??  Jake Sully, about to die, saved by the daughter of the chief, and the daughter takes him under her wing and they fall in love, which adds a whole other continent of colonization to the discussion).  When I read The Giver with my seventh grade students, we used it as an opportunity to think about the question, "Is utopia possible?"  They tried to make one - they were charged with deciding on an economic system, political system, religion, etc. that would maximize human happiness, and the conclusion that they all came to was that it was basically impossible to engineer a society where everyone was happy without severely curtailing individual rights, which defeated the whole purpose. 

To wrap it up here with some connections to history, I just skimmed through a biography of Louisa May Alcott - her father, Bronson Alcott, was a progressive educator who founded a vegan utopian society called Fruitlands in the 1840s in Massachusetts.  Real utopian movements throughout history are fascinating to read about and consider in light of futuristic societies in fiction, also serving as a source of social commentary.  Two other examples I can think of are M.T. Anderson's other novel (which I liked much better than Feed), The Astonishing Story of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation (set in Revolutionary War America) and As Meat Loves Salt (which I actually lost patience with), set in the English Civil War.

O'Quinn, E.J. and Heather Atwell.  (2010).  "Familiar Aliens: Science Fiction as Social Commentary."  ALAN Review.  Volume 37, Issue 3.  ProQuest Education Journals. pg. 45-50.

"From Insider to Outsider: The Evolution of Young Adult Literature," Michael Cart

In a similar vein to my last post, this article from Voices from the Middle discusses the changes in adolescent literature over time, but from a much more recent perspective than the Hamilton article.  Michael Cart, himself an award-winning YA author, covers changes from the 1950s to the time of publication (2001).  

Cart begins by relaying some rare statistics of hope about adolescent reading habits: 56% of all students between age 12 and 18 read in excess of 10 books every year, and 70% of middle school students read upwards of 10 books annually.  Cart really has no evidence for why this might be, but says he "likes to think" that middle school students read so much because of "the amazing abundance of good young adult books currently being published for them" (95). 

Cart does refer to some demographic changes in who is considered "adolescent" according to book publishers, making the argument that the range has gradually expanded on both ends, now including "tweens" as well as twenty-somethings.  (Certainly there has been quite a bit of crossover appeal to many recent best-sellers, for example, Harry Potter, Twilight, even The Hunger Games, all of which many parents of adolescents were reading.)

Cart then summarizes each decade's trends in YA lit, starting with the 1940s and 50s, in which "genre fiction" like mystery, adventure, sports, sci fi, and romance was first marketed toward a specific adolescent age group.  The 1960s marked the beginning of that "new realism" I talked about in my previous post, with books like The Outsiders and Robert Lipsyte's The Contender.  These books were not just realistic fiction, but more "hard-edged" (96), as Cart says, focusing on gritty topics relevant to many teen readers, but written in a more artful manner than the more formulaic genre fiction of the previous generation.  In the 1970s, "the decade of the problem novel" (96), this trend became quite pronounced.  Cart explains these "problem novels" as "didactic works of social realism that sacrificed art on the alter of individual 'problems of the week' (alcoholism, drug abuse, divorce, poverty, etc., ad nauseum)" (96).  Because of their [at times unpopular] commitment to discussing gritty social issues, Cart seems to think that genre fiction experienced a resurgence in the 1980s (i.e. Sweet Valley High, Fear Street).  This is an interesting idea that I had never really considered - a kind of retrenchment from social issues in fiction that certainly parallels the move in educational policy away from involvement in or direct amelioration of social problems.

In the 1990s, middle school literature became popular as publishers started to market many YA books to a slightly younger age group, and there was an overall expansion of who was considered a "YA" and just how "Y" they actually were.  Cart says that this "expansion of the audience...freed authors to tackle more serious subjects and to introduce more complex characters and considerations of ambiguity" (96), leading us to what he believes is our current golden age of YA lit.  For the trends of the early-2000s, Cart correctly anticipates the emergence of more graphic media, such as a the graphic novel or other cross-genre hybrid texts (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian or Monster by Walter Dean Meyers).  He also points to the mass popularity of complex works of YA sci fi and fantasy, such as The Golden Compass trilogy.

I agree with Cart that there is a great deal of YA literature to choose from now with deep and juicy themes, rich symbolism, written about issues that adolescents directly care about, and written in a style that is usually more accessible to them.  I think there is an implicit idea in Cart's article that genre fiction is "bad."  I might amplify this a bit by saying that genre fiction may not be what you want to choose for an entire class to read, but I think it is important to understand too that some students just love a certain series, and honestly, reading is reading!  Why split hairs and validate only some "official" books, as we were discussing in class today?  For example, middle school boys often love Mike Lupica's sports books.  They are certainly perfectly fine books, and I would never discourage any student who loved them from reading them.  In fact, I would often direct male reluctant readers towards them.  However, I don't think they are meaty enough to justify reading as a class.  The more I learn about the exponential growth of background knowledge that comes through reading and how it directly correlated with academic success, I think, wow, just get kids to read anything that they enjoy and find any way you can to get them to keep going.  They will transition just fine to more "official" texts later. 

Cart, M.  (2001).  "From insider to outsider: The evolution of young adult literature."  Voices From the Middle; 9 (2), p. 95-97.

"Mapping a History of Adolescence and Literature for Adolescents," Greg Hamilton

I always like to read review articles whenever I can find them.  I'm definitely a big picture person, and review articles help me to see trends in a field much more easily.  Plus, review articles help me learn a lot in a relatively short amount of time, always a plus!  So, my first blog post then, is about an article I found from the ALAN Review, "Mapping a History of Adolescence and Literature for Adolescents," by Greg Hamilton, an assistant professor of English ed at Teachers College (at the time of publication).  Hamilton writes about "the historical terrains of both adolescence and the contempo­rary fictions adults have created for adolescents" (57).  Sounds intriguing, huh?  How have ideas about adolescence changed over time?  What kind of ideas do adults have about the period of adolescence now, and how does that shape how we teach and work with actual adolescents?

Hamilton's first point is that it is useful for teachers to reflect on their own experiences as adolescents in order to relate to their students.  Hamilton then summarizes some of the changes in conceptions of childhood and adolescence over history.  I'm often a bit skeptical of overarching historical narratives like this one because they tend to be pretty simplistic, but I agree with his general point that there have been cyclical changes in views of childhood (including adolescence).  Hamilton relies exclusively on Eastwood Atwater's (what a name!) 1992 textbook Adolescence to claim that ancient Greeks divided childhood into three periods, birth to age seven, seven to puberty, and puberty to age 21.  The society of the Middle Ages, in contrast, viewed children as "miniature adults" (58), who were apprenticed at an early age.  Rousseau's more romantic notions of childhood (18th century) were a turn toward childhood as a distinct period separate from adulthood, with a gradual development of reasoning capabilities during age 12-15.  In America, however, many children went to work on farms or later in factories as adolescence was beginning, usually after receiving some basic education.  In America, a period of "adolescence" couldn't really exist until public education had expanded, thanks to common schooling movements in the mid-19th century, and compulsory education and child labor laws in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Once secondary education was a reality for an ever-increasing number of children, the period of adolescence as we think of it today began to take shape.

Of course, there are a number of developmental theories of adolescence that have been popularized throughout the 20th century, relying on observational or biological data.  Very popular in teacher education programs, for example, are Piaget's stages of preoperational, concrete, and formal operations.  (Hamilton also cites G. Stanley Hall, Freud, Erikson, Kohlberg, and Bandura).  A commonality between many of these theories of development is that the adolescent gradually becomes more independent and more capable of abstract thought.  In the last forty years or so, there has been a great deal of attention to the socio-cultural factors involved in adolescent development, primarily race, class, and gender.

Hamilton then moves to a discussion of how literature written for adolescents has changed over time.  Here, he draws heavily on Bushman & Bushman's Using Young Adult Literature in the English Classroom (1997).  Whereas many scholars might identify the birth of young adult literature with The Outsiders (1967) or with The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Bushman & Bushman look at the didactic literature that dominated not just children's or adolescent literature, but practically all literature as having the purpose of "socializ[ing] children into the expected adult habits and behaviors of that time" (60).  The birth of the novel in the 1700s began to open a window for literature directed specifically toward children, but reading materials were still primarily intended to present moral lessons from an external, rather than a first person, perspective.  It was not until the 1960s that what we would recognize today as "young adult literature" began to be published, written in a realistic style, free from a moralizing tone, and often featuring characters involved in some kind of controversial topic.

Hamilton devotes the last part of his review article to reflecting on the controversies that are sometimes involved in teaching young adult literature, [perhaps obviously] coming out on the side advocating for teaching young adult lit.  For example, many young adult novels contain language, sex, drugs, etc. (vs. the "old chestnuts," as my adolescent lit professor at UVA used to say :o) ), so how should a teacher prepare for a parent challenge to a text?  Another potential criticism Hamilton mentions is the belief of many teachers that there just isn't time to teach even the "tried and true" - why should they waste time on something risky? 

A few concluding comments: first, Hamilton tries to summarize two huge bodies of literature here in writing about the development of the concept of adolescence and the development of adolescent literature.  (I find his narrative problematic, as I said, because he summarizes just a couple of secondary sources to tell the story of each body of literature, and presents a fairly simplistic story, which of course I have even further simplified in my own summary above...how very meta.)  What Hamilton doesn't address as much, however, are the connections between the two topics.  For example, is the growth of the modern YA lit genre directly related to the growth of the modern idea of adolescence?  I would imagine so, although Hamilton connects it to the growth of the "new realism" instead.  (This was a literary movement I had never heard of before.  I may write another blog post summarizing it, as the little I can find quickly says that it is realistic fiction, obviously, but that deals with controversial or taboo subjects.)

Lastly, regarding teaching controversial works of adolescent literature: I know that we devoted a good bit of time to writing rationales for potential challenges to adolescent literature when I was in my teacher preparation program - is this even relevant anymore?  Much of the first wave of adolescent lit is pretty canonical now - The Outsiders, for example, is probably considered more "classic" than YA lit at this point.  Then again, we went through the whole process of getting Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian approved at my old school, only to be told at the last minute that it was too controversial to use (after the district had already bought the books).  So I guess one of my questions is, how do you know when to take a stand, how to do so in a politically-savvy way, and when is it not worth it?  In addition, isn't there lots of YA lit "of literary merit" that does not meet this kind of "new realism" definition of dealing with a controversial topic? 

Hamilton, G. (Winter 2002).  "Mapping a History of Adolescence and Literature for Adolescents."  The ALAN Review.  Vol. 29, Issue 2.  p. 57-62.