Lecture on Marcelo in the Real World

1. Lecture on Marcelo in the Real World ENGL 3840, Adolescent Literature

2. Death and Sickness in YA Literature • Up until the mid-19th century, a great deal of children’s literature focused on death. • High infant mortality rates • Romanticization of the dead child • Focus on the afterlife in many religious communities

3. Death and Sickness in YA Literature • In the 19th century, the rise of realism in YA literature led authors to turn their focus away from death, dying, and the afterlife to texts that focused more on young people growing up to become model citizens. • Sickness became a code for non-normative behavior that had to be corrected or tamed.

4. Coolidge’s What Katy Did (1872) • Katy Carr wants to be a tomboy and to grow up to have a profession, both behaviors that were frowned upon in the late 19th century. • In a frenzy of misbehavior, she swings on a swing that is broken and falls (both an actual fall and a symbolic one). • Her cousin Helen, who is an invalid but makes the best of her situation, comes to Katy and puts her through “The School of Pain.” • Once Katy has become demure, she is “cured” and marries.

5. YA Literature, Disability Studies, and Rethinking Norms • By the 1980s and 1990s, problem novels for teens moved into new territory, with an increased focus on issues of illness and disability. • However, just as Artie and Sybil were treated as aberrations in Blume’s Forever-- as teens whose inability to conform to mainstream definitions of sexual orientation or of idealized bodies rendered them inferior to Katherine and Michael -- characters with disabilities in subsequent problem novels continued to be viewed as individuals who needed to be “normalized.”

6. In her essay “’Nothing Feels as Real’: Teen Sick-Lit, Sadness, and the Condition of Adolescence,” Julie Passanante Elman discusses the way that disability and illness manifest themselves in YA problem novels of the 1980s and 1990s. She focuses in on authors such as Lurlene McDaniel, whose novels often equate health and ablebodiedness with normalcy.

7. Elman on Teen “Sick Lit” of the 1980s • “Problem-driven narratives quickly became the prevailing literary and cultural form exclusively for teenagers, and one that, through its pedagogical approach to storytelling, articulated a relationship between consuming “healthy” popular culture and developing good citizenship.” (176). • “Within this normative framework, good citizenship implied adherence to traditional norms of gender, heterosexuality, ablebodiedness, and emotional management (the ability to express “appropriate” emotional responses to the social world).” (176)

8. The Depiction of Illness and Disability in YA Literature • Elman: “Alana Kumbier argues that YA disease literature portrays ‘sick people’ as objects of inspiration, pity, tragedy, and innocence; as ‘narcissistic’ or duplicitous figures in need of medical and parental surveillance; and most importantly, as ‘vehicles for others’ emotional growth and sentimental education’.” (179). • Let’s take a moment and relate this quote to Powell’s Swallow Me Whole. • We will return to this quote when we discuss Stork’s text – does Stork portray Marcelo in this way?

9. What Happens When a Teen Reader Contemplates the Illness of a Protagonist? • Elman: “Engendering both fascination with and aversion to the ill body of an enfreaked fictional protagonist, teen sick-lit’s unrelenting diagnostic indexing of characters’ symptoms also compels readers to imagine their own bodies as subject to an endless “body project,” encouraging them to self-examine not only for signs of illness (as many fans of the books report doing) but also for other markers of undesirability or abnormality that might be improved.” (180).

10. How Readers May Respond • By focusing on the ill or the disabled, teen “sick lit,” readers are encouraged to scrutinize their own bodies and behaviors. As Elman notes, “Within these stories, disability and disease, as embodied metaphors, become the material basis upon which normal bodies are rendered visible” (180). • What Elman means is that many people take ablebodiedness for granted and only SEE it when they are asked to contemplate disability.

11. Maturity and Disability • Elman observes that “characters with disabilities or diseases are often desexualized within dominant culture…” ( 186). • In most of these novels, ablebodied individuals are equated with maturity, whereas individuals with disabilities are equated with stunted growth or with immaturity. • These texts imply that in order to “grow up,” characters need to leave illness behind, or if they are not ablebodied, they need to prove that they can function as “normal” in spite of their supposed difference.

12. Contemporary YA Lit and Disability • In the last decade, a number of authors have attempted to call into question the storyline that equates disability with immaturity or lack. • Over the next two class periods, we will consider whether Stork is able to depict Marcelo in a way that is realistic, respectful, and thoughtful. How is maturity and disability handled in the text? What factors might lead a reader not only to care about Marcelo, but to identify with him? These are only a few of the ways that we will consider Stork’s text.