Abstract
Death has been a major theme in YA literature from its inception, prompting Roberta Seelinger Trites to theorize that the protagonist of a YA novel must accept death as an ultimate “curtailment of their power” (140) in order to achieve maturity. While her arguments hold true for twentieth century texts, this paper explores how this condition has shifted somewhat in twenty-first century YA. Instead of accepting death as permanent and inevitable, contemporary novels often stage plots that enable characters to deny its power altogether by trivializing it; personifying and romanticizing death as a human-like character deserving of empathy; rendering it as an act of choice for teen characters; or denying it outright through recursive plotting or posthuman fantasies. In addition, deaths caused by social injustices are increasingly used as a rallying cry for activist responses. Threaded throughout these trends is a common denominator of positioning death as a challenge to traditional ways of thinking about the value, meaning, and desirability of human life. This paper suggests that Nietzsche’s concepts of active and passive nihilism are useful to explore the extent to which these ways of denying death’s power are successful in encouraging an active questioning of death rather than a passive acceptance as the condition of achieving maturity in the twenty-first century.
Highlights
Since its inception, the modern YA corpus has been littered with dead bodies, both offstage and on
This paper suggests that Nietzsche’s concepts of active and passive nihilism are useful to explore the extent to which these ways of denying death’s power are successful in encouraging an active questioning of death rather than a passive acceptance as the condition of achieving maturity in the twenty-first century
Characters like Holden Caulfield, Ponyboy Curtis, and Jerry Renault walk through their days enshrouded in grief over dead siblings, best friends, and parents
Summary
The modern YA corpus has been littered with dead bodies, both offstage and on. I suggest that the same basic pieces that have always appeared in YA fiction – deaths of parents, siblings, and classmates; deaths resulting from suicide and social injustice; and engagements with the paranormal – are still there, but have been twisted in contemporary YA literature into new patterns of function and response for characters and readers. Beyond descriptions of these functions for death, I want to suggest a possible way to make sense of why these new patterns have emerged. Reynolds’ astute identification of these culturally mirroring gestures across the landscape of YA literature bears both focus and expansion as we consider the kaleidoscopic shifts in how death appears in twenty-first century YA fiction, with the focus being on how these trends might blend to participate in a denial of death’s final authority, and the expansion considering how nihilism, technology and posthumanism function in that endeavor
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