My university is offering a course on reading & writing YA, and I can't help but feel as though it's a damaging inclusion.
I know that it's important for English departments to keep with the times, but this feels less like education and more like appealing to the lowest common denominator. The reading selections are all simplistic narratives that center around gender/race (Part-Time Indian, Hate U Give, etc.), and the final project is writing a relatively short short story. There's hardly any substance to the course. The professor, who I've taken classes with before, doesn't teach/use even basic technical language (syntax, consonance, assonance, parallel structure), and tends to condescend to her students, treating them more like annoying customers than kids trying to learn. It makes me angry that she's using up a tenure track position when our resident Joyce scholar is only an adjunct.
Should I feel as upset about this as I do? If so, what can I do about it?
Blake Jackson
Do you also go to /pol/ and ask them what they think about Jews or to /r9k/ asking about women?
>If so, what can I do about it? Pick another course, you helpless fucking idiot
Ryder Morgan
I'm not taking the class, but I'd like to petition to have it removed, or something along those lines. If nothing else, I'd want to do something which could help our Joycean.
Pic related is the description of another YA class. Turns out there's 3, not 1.
Christopher Diaz
>unironically being an elitist gatekeeper Kill yourself, OP.
Things that have value don't need protection to survive.
Landon Hernandez
I've always disliked the young adult label. There's no such thing as a young adult. It's a marketing term made to make immature people feel comfortable for reading bad teenage literature.
Julian Sanders
Your stupid petition won't do shit in the grand scheme of things. Get on with your life
Jordan Taylor
You could voice your concerns to the dean. If you do it intelligently I doubt they'll try to retaliate against you, but you should probably get a read on the department's politics before hand anyway.
Anthony Wright
write a YA novel about an alt right autist who realises he was trans all along
Adrian Bell
imagine paying money to take literature courses at university
Tyler Young
I need to take 4 electives from the Arts program so I'm doing a grammar and syntax course and a creative writing course.
Josiah Long
>paying money for university How American
Dominic Foster
Imagine paying money and 4 or more years of your life for an Arts degree.
Christopher Johnson
>yfw political science degrees get you jobs in the public service >yfw public service jobs are cushy as fuck >yfw you spend your whole life wageslaving for a company while i get fat stacks of taxpayer money just for wiping my ass
Carson White
spoken like a true philistine i dont care if i work minimum wage and live in a hovel as long as i get published
Isaac Murphy
>writing for the acclaim of others >not writing because you are compelled to do so by original ideas you must express lel
Logan Myers
if a tree falls in the forest...
Jace Scott
I am the forest.
Chase Torres
You want to write a book that will be read in 2018? You write YA. Authors are competing with movies and video games, they dont have time to twiddle their dicks with autistic prose anymore
Also, lets be honest, all "serious" writing now days is just intersectional vomit
Michael James
Fuck the plebs. Enough dumbing down. People need to either rise up or drown.
>literature >YA
choose wisely
Charles Phillips
I was reading Aldous Huxley and Iain Banks as a teenager.
It's a marketing term for promoting shitty high concept books that are easy to sell to non-readers.
Isaiah Ross
>Fuck the plebs. You first, scum.
Zachary Rogers
>Pic related is the description of another YA class. Turns out there's 3, not 1.
Honestly, those are decent questions to ask. I do agree with you that YA is trash, but who is a "young adult" and what determines "literature" are valid interesting questions to ask.
Just because they ask doesn't mean the class won't necessarily challenge young adult literature and what people's infatuation with it is.