young adult

Since digital technology began to saturate every part of society, critics have been trying to come to terms with how it has affected our culture, not least literary texts. Young adult fiction was an early responder to digital technology. Internet novels such as ttyl (2005) by Lauren Myracle, Click Here: To Find out How I Survived Seventh Grade (2006) by Denise Vega, and Tweet Heart (2010) by Elizabeth Rudnick revolve around Internet culture thematically as well as structurally: the layout of the codex often resemble chatrooms, emails, or blog posts. 

This paper focuses on a particularly interesting YA novel, Skeleton Creek (2009) by Patrick Carman (the first book in a series of five). The novel tells a story of a friendship between a boy, Ryan, and a girl, Sarah as they together try to unravel the mystery of a haunted house. Compositionally, the novel combines a codex that mimics a diary with Internet-based videos. The critical attention to the novel has mainly appeared in the field of library and educational sciences, as tends to be the case with much of YA literary scholarship (Caroline Hunt 1996). While this vantage point is useful, author believes that closer attention to Skeleton Creek as an aesthetic object and a consideration of its elaborate composition is necessary to come to terms with what to call such fiction and how to understand it. 

Skeleton Creek has been called a vook (Groenke, et al. 2011), a transmedia text (Mcdonald & Parker 2013), or described as “gamified” fiction (Martens 2014). None of these categories, author argues, suffices to describe the complex architecture of the work. Focusing on the novel as a complex aesthetic work (rather than, as most critics do, a text useful for the pedagogic goal of encouraging young people to read), author explores the intricate interplay between the codex and the digital that Skeleton Creek stages. Of particular significance are the moments that eject the reader from the codex and send him or her to the Internet.  Author proposes the metaphor of “haunting” to describe the codex/Internet nodes on which the architecture of Skeleton Creek relies. While many have portrayed Skeleton Creek as an unproblematic coming-together of text and video, some readers sense the innate tension the novel creates. Argument of author is that the architecture of the narrative is constructed on the tensions between rupture and convergence.

The digital turn brings about not only changes in young adult literature considered as aesthetic artifacts and literary works but also changes in the perception and reception of the reader. Digital young adult literature is increasingly multimodal and interactive, and it integrates elements from game aesthetics. When young adult literature navigates between media, new analytical approaches are required to explore the way in which it operates among various aesthetic strategies and medialities and the way it affects the young adult reader. With this development it becomes essential to combine different fields of research, e.g. research in literature and media science; thus, the focus of this paper will be research in children’s literature in an intermedial perspective. The analytical approach can be either diachronic when the object is the study of how various aesthetic expressions (text, picture, sound, etc.) have been used to create the literary artifact, or the approach can be synchronically based when the object is studying the categories which cut across the aesthetic expressions with the aim of transgressing conceivable media specific borders, and the latter will be the focal point here.

The pivotal point of this paper will be exploring how transgressing analytical categories, e.g. rhythm, sequentiality, time, space and dialogue with the reader, can shed light on the formation of meaning in a specific digital young adult literary work, i.e. Tavs (Camilla Hübbe, Rasmus Meisler and Stefan Pasborg 2013) which prompts different reading methods, paths, and types of interaction. The analysis will focus on selected analytical categories in order to explore the integration of various art forms and sensory appeals, viz. visual, auditory, and tactile modalities. In other words, the paper will investigate the ‘denaturalization’ of the reading process and it will attempt to investigate and offer analytical categories which can be used also by young readers so that they can become competent cross media readers of young adult literature in a digitalized and medialized landscape of texts.

Theoretically, the presentation will be based on theory on digital literature and media (Hayles, N. Kathrine Electronic Literature. New Horizons for the Literary. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 2008, Simanowski, Roberto, Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla (ed.) Reading Moving Letters. Digital Literature in Research and Teaching. Bielefeld, Trancript Verlag 2010, Bell, Alice, Astrid Ensslin and Hans Kristian Rustad Analyzing Digital Fiction. New York: Routledge 2014) and theory on picturebook (Nikolajeva, Maria and Carole Scott (2006) How picturebooks work. New York: Routledge).

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)