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‘From Both Sides Now’: Power and Powerlessness in Two Contemporary Novels of the Middle East

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Abstract

The paper analyses the narrative techniques utilised in two contemporary young adult novels: Elizabeth Laird's A Little Piece of Ground (2003) and Pnina Moed Kass's Real Time (2004). Set in Palestine and Israel respectively, these novels present convincing psychological portraits of young people on both sides of the Middle East conflict. The paper analyses to what extent each novel allows readers the imaginative freedom to explore opposing points of view, arguing that a text that fails to present readers with a nuanced representation of reality leaves them open to intellectual manipulation by creating a self-contained world in which opposing points of view are in effect censored by their absence.

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Narrative theory as a lens for viewing children's literature began to be used in earnest in the mid‐1980s. Early studies restricted themselves to structural concerns; these were followed by more ideological approaches that included focuses on feminism and race. Character studies are a major focus, including a particular emphasis on anthropomorphism, the use of which has had a great many interpretations. Narration practices and the relationship between authorial voice and the position of the narrator have been extensively studied. Due to the rhetorical nature of children's literature, there has been an interest in the ethical implications for the structure of narrative and the representation of the child, especially regarding gender and race as they all relate to the implied and real reader of the child. Interest in cognitive narratology and theory of mind are brand new directions in narrative theory in children's literature.
Article
The incentive to reflect a characters' internal life is a relatively recent development in Western literature, often connected with Henry James and Virginia Woolf. In children's literature, this tendency has only become prominent during the last twenty or thirty years. Mikhail Bakhtin's terminology can explain this phenomenon for us: it is a shift from epic toward polyphonic discourse, from depicting primarily an external flow of events to attempting to convey the complex nature of human consciousness. Bakhtin's concept of the dialogical nature of the novel, as opposed to the epic in "Epic and Novel," is extremely helpful in pinpointing the specific aesthetics of children's literature, as several critics have done, most recently Robyn McCallum in Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction (Bakhtin 3-40; see also Nikolajeva, Children's Literature 95-120). Yet while McCallum is primarily interested in how the dialogics between self and society, culture, and ideology govern the construction of subjectivity, and thus examines the connection between thematic and narrative aspects of texts, I have in this essay chosen to concentrate on the purely textual relationship between the author/ narrator and the character. A children's novel is constructed in a dialogical tension between two unequal subjectivities, an adult author and a child character. In "Discourse in the Novel" and especially in "The Author and the Hero in Aesthetic Activity," Bakhtin explores the relationship between the authorial and the figural discourse, that is, narrations that can be ascribed to an autonomous narrative agency or to a character respectively.1 This complex relationship results in a variety of blended narratives that have been classified as stream of consciousness, interior monologue, Erlebte Rede, free indirect discourse, dual-voice discourse, narrated monologue, and so on (see Pascal 8-32; Martin 130-51). All of these techniques presuppose that authors, through their narrators, enter the minds of their characters and are able to convey their state of mind to readers by means of language. This statement in itself presents a problem since language does not always have adequate means to express vague, inarticulate thoughts and emotions—an argument found in much postmodern criticism. In children's novels, the duality of the voice is further enhanced by the asymmetrical power position of the author (in most cases an adult), the narrator (who may be an adult or a child), and the character (in most cases a child). The particular poetics of children's literature thus demands that when applying analytical tools from general criticism, be it narratology (Genette, Chatman, Rimmon-Kenan, Bal) or speech act theory (Austin, Pratt, Banfield, Lanser, Fludernik), we must necessarily adapt them by taking the specifics of children's literature into consideration, which is the goal of this essay. Although the questions of subjectivity, narrative perspective, and authorial control in children's fiction have been investigated from a variety of vantage points,2 there are few special studies of the portrayal of internal life in children's fiction.3 A general consensus about children's literature seems to be that adult writers can easily recreate a child character's mind, while logically it should be infinitely more difficult than to reflect the mind of another adult. By analogy, it is often questioned, especially by feminist, postcolonial, and queer theories, whether male writers can successfully depict the internal life of female characters, or white writers of black characters, or heterosexual writers of homosexual characters. This skepticism is based on the unequal power positions, in which the "oppressors" presumably have limited possibility to understand the mentality of the "oppressed." Even though all adult writers have been children once, the profound difference in life experience as well as linguistic skills creates an inevitable discrepancy between the (adult) narrative voice and both the focalized child character's and the young reader's levels of comprehension. The infamous "double address," although primarily referring to the implied audience rather than the textual perspective, nevertheless conveys the essence of the dilemma (Wall 9, passim). The many successful attempts to breach this discrepancy—for instance, by using strong internal focalization of a child character or the first-person (autodiegetic) child perspective—do not eliminate the dilemma as such.4 In this essay...
Article
Critics of young adult fiction have good reason to dwell on the nature of narrative authority in the young adult novel, especially the authority claimed through the consciousness of young characters.1 That young adult novels are almost always written in first-person address was observed by Elizabeth Schuhmann almost two decades ago: "Because of this prevalence of first-person narration in young adult novels and because of the popularity of these books, many advocates of novels written for young people have come to consider first-person narration a preferred technique for this kind of literature" (314). But it is the language of the American Library Association's Margaret A. Edwards Award that highlights the irony of this "preferred technique": in worthy young adult literature, young adults will hear "an authentic voice that continues to illuminate their experiences and emotions, giving insight into their lives" (Barber 123). The irony of the use of "authenticity" is important to consider. While any novel is an ideal site for studying the different layers of narrative relationships, the young adult novel that features the consciousness of young characters is especially interesting because of the unique and ironic relationship between author and reader in this age-based genre. Novels constructed by adults to simulate an authentic adolescent's voice are inherently ironic because the so-called adolescent voice is never—and can never be—truly authentic. I would like first to discuss the nature of the irony implicit in this genre with the "preferred technique" of speaking through the consciousness of the young and then consider how novels that employ double-voiced discourse offer young adult readers the tools necessary for identifying and coping with that irony. Throughout I offer speculations—my own as well as those of others—on the ethical implications of this ironic relationship. Robert Small points out that "adolescent fiction often employs a point of view which presents the adolescent's interpretation of the events of the story" which results in "incomplete 'growth to awareness' on the part of the central character" (282). The YA novelist often not only speaks from the position of the young adult but also often believably presents that incomplete growth to awareness without challenge from within the text. This is not a condition that results exclusively from the use of first-person address, however. While first-person narration makes it easy to present immature and unchallenged views, indirect address can achieve the same effect. What is more important than the type of address is the focalizer's level of maturity and the degree to which his or her view is challengeable and challenged. And while it is uncommon for first-person address to shift to multiple perspectives (one tool for calling some or all ideologies into question), third person address is not necessarily obliged to present the positions, perspectives, and politics of all, or even some, of the characters in the text, as we shall see.2 In any case, by employing an all-too-reliable young adult's consciousness, the YA novelist often intentionally communicates to the immature reader a single and limited awareness of the world that the novelist knows to be incomplete and insufficient. It is a sophisticated representation of a lack of sophistication; it is an artful depiction of artlessness. Does the author's maintenance of this ironic relationship necessarily mean that he or she somehow abandons the young reader? I don't believe that it does—or that it has to. Wayne Booth questions Northrop Frye's assertion that the ironist, like the lyricist, turns his back on the audience: "some ironies are written to be understood, and...most readers will regret their own failures to understand" (Booth, Rhetoric xi). The author of the young adult novel as described above counts on the reader's failure to see, understand, and subsequently regret the adult's ironic construction of an "authentic" adolescent's voice. However, by helping the reader recognize the limits of the young adult consciousness in the text, the author ethically trades the visibility of irony at one narrative level for the irony at another. All of this matters because the narrative situation in question involves social power relations that...
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