Battle of the Books - The problem with "problem" young-adult fiction. By Ann?Hulbert
Highly-recommended article by Ann Hulbert, writing in 'Slate'.
In a well-referenced, tightly-argued persuasive piece she attacks the way inferior issue novels are used in US schools...
the real trouble with such issues-oriented contemporary fiction is that it encourages what you might call (in Jeanne Kirkpatrick style) literary equivalence: The genre, as teachers have discovered with the help of accompanying guides, lends itself to trendy and tidy didacticism. And so the books can end up as assigned reading for older kids precisely when these students deserve to be discovering the difference between real literature and the melodramatic fictional equivalent of an Afterschool Special
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