Module 15: Censored Books

Module 15: Censorship Issues

Book: The Perks of being a Wallflower

Author: Stephen Chbosky

Plot

            Charlie narrates his story by sending letters to an acquaintance that remains nameless to the reader. Charlie, a very quiet and emotionally sensitive teenager is about to enter highschool with a backpack full of internal demons. Lacking in friends, Charlie meets Patrick and Sam who befriend him and thus becoming a part of their circle. Charlie then experiences many life altering moments that leads to a break down that shines a light on the darkness of his past but allows him to gradually heal and move on.

Impression of the Book

            I love the book. The character were endearing and the story was honest. It taught me many things, some of which were in any given moment when we have epiphanies, “we are infinite”, “ we accept the love we think we deserve”, and to “participate in life”.

Implementation in Library Setting

            Because the book is a commonly censored book and deals with controversial issues, the implementation of teaching this book in a Library Setting would just have to be when one is dealing with censored books; i.e. censored book week. Or, a comparison and contrast of what Greek 15 year old mythological characters go through in the Greek Mythologies versus that of Perks…and then Shakespearean characters versus Chbosky’s characters.

           

Reviews

            “Charlie has issues. His favorite aunt passed away, and his best friend just committed suicide. The girl he loves wants him as a friend; a girl he does not love wants him as a lover. His 18-year-old sister is pregnant. The LSD he took is not sitting well. And he has a math quiz looming. Charlie is the high school freshman protagonist of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky, a 29-year-old screenwriter. Published by MTV, it is one of a new generation of novels geared toward teenagers, for whom such subjects are increasingly just part of growing up.

Young-adult novels, as the genre used to be called, still center on disenfranchised adolescents who could be direct descendants of Holden Caulfield. Now, though, says Stephen Roxburgh, president and publisher of Front Street Books, "the heat has been turned up." Front Street helped bring so-called bleak books to early teens in 1997 when it published one book set in a juvenile-detention facility (Adam Rapp's The Buffalo Tree) and another in which a 13-year-old sleeps with her mother's boss (Brock Cole's The Facts Speak for Themselves). They were followed by Melvin Burgess's even more graphic Smack, a British novel imported by Henry Holt, which details a middle-class 15-year-old's descent into the world of heroin addiction and prostitution.

These books and others that feature stark themes, complex plot lines and ambiguous resolutions are edging out the happy endings and conventional morals of the old-style teen "problem" novels, which would obsess over something like a divorce, or an accidental pregnancy, for 120 pages. "The formula has been broken," says Eliza Dresang, author of Radical Change: Books for Youth in a Digital Age.

Now in its fourth printing, The Perks of Being a Wallflower has developed a cult following since it was released in February. "It reminded me of me and my friends, totally and completely," a teen reader reported on an AOL message board. Said another: "I don't read books by choice too often, but I really loved this one."

Book merchants and publishers love it too. Amazon.com has designated a special area for teens online; chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble have begun to do the same in their stores (hint: look for teen racks near the coffee bar). To make the books more attractive to young people, publishers are printing them in larger sizes and illustrating their covers with bold colors and stylish graphics. They're also promoting the books on TV shows and in magazines that are popular with youngsters, as well as on websites.

Teen fiction may, in fact, be the first literary genre born of the Internet. Its fast-paced narratives draw upon the target demographic's kinship with MTV, which has a joint venture with Pocket Books, and with the Internet and kids' ease in processing information in unconventional formats. Smack is told by multiple narrators. Monster, the latest novel by veteran children's book author Walter Dean Myers, is recounted in the form of a screenplay. Louis Sachar's Holes, last year's Newbery and National Book Award winner about a boy erroneously sent to a juvenile detention center, shuttles between past and present.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is presented as a collection of letters the narrator has written to an unspecified recipient. Nearing the end of his freshman year, Charlie realizes what he likes about a certain book, and his description serves to explain the appeal of his own narrative: "It wasn't like you had to really search for the philosophy. It was pretty straightforward, I thought, and the great part is that I took what the author wrote about and put it in terms of my own life."

Teen books may not be able to compete with the visuals of The Matrix, but they do provide a few hours of what teens may need most: time to think. And there's nothing bleak about that.”- Spitz, D.

APA Citations

Chbosky, S. (1999). The perks of being a wallflower. New York: Pocket Books.

Spitz, D. (1999). Reads Like Teen Spirit. Time, 154(3), 79.

Module 14: Poetry and Story Collections

Module 14: Poetry and Story Collections

Book: The Monsterologist:  A Memoir in Rhyme

Author: Bobbi Katz

Illustrator: Adam McCauley

Plot

The book starts by telling the reader what a Monsterologist is through poem and continuous by then introducing and explaining each monster met by the Monsterologist through verse. Count Dracula writes to the Monsterologist while most of the rest are explanations. The book travels all around the globe explaining and introducing monsters and creatures of all kind in verse with illustrations that are scrapbook-esque and reminiscent of The Spiderwick Chronicles books of faeries and such.

Impression of the Book

            I loved the book and enjoyed it immensely. I have read my fair share of monster books and –ology books but this book, by far, has been the most enjoyable for it brings together two of my favorite things: Poetry and Halloween related ghouls.

Implementation of Book in Library Setting

            During Halloween, I would read these to the kids and then ask the kids to create their own monsters, characteristics and all. And then, as a judge, I would have them all present their monsters however they may want (either through simple storytelling, art work, dressing up).

Reviews

            “Definitely not to be mistaken as an entry in the increasingly ubiquitous Ology line, this book offers a collection of hideous beastie–based verses. From an invitation to visit Count Dracula to an international zombie census, the quality of the poems is wildly inconsistent, sometimes even from line to line, as when a clever gross-out (“Greasy green lizards / and raw chicken gizzards,”) gets a poem rolling, only to have it fall flat on its face with “spell-binding spells/ cast by spell-casting wizards.” More often than not, though, bursts of devilish humor and winking creepiness keep things moving, and McCauley’s well-designed pages—outfitted in a sort of loose, splashy collage, with a few sturdy fold-outs—have browsing appeal. Cleverly, alongside old favorites—from medusas and witches to krakens and the Loch Ness Monster—Katz dreams up her own baddies, like the compu-monster that gobbles up hard drives, and the voracious Verbivore (take heed, librarians!).”-Chipman, I.

 

APA Citation

Chipman, I. (2009). The Monsterologist: A Memoir In Rhyme. Booklist, 106(2), 61.

Katz, B., & McCauley, A. (2009). The monsterologist: A memoir in rhyme. New York: Sterling.

Module 13: Graphic Novels

Module 13: Graphic Novels

Book: Maus

Author and Illustrator: Art Spiegelman

Plot

            The author-illustrator traces his father's imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp through a series of disarming and unusual cartoons arranged to tell the story as a novel. Many of the history of the War, The Holocaust, and the plight of Eastern European Jews during the time of Hitler’s reign but not many have read about personal accounts of the experience. In Maus, the reader will not only delve into the world of those interned but also realize that reality and fantastical horror are not all that different when the villain id both human monstrous at the same time.

Impression of the Book

Art Speigelman's novel MAUS is quality literature because it is able to deliver a heavy and heart wrenching story through illustrations and narrative that not only causes the reader to re-examine just exactly what a graphic novel is but allows the reader to ponder about the books subject matter (the Holocaust). Despite the subject matter, the book is more approachable to for highschool students and adults alike because of the way it is formatted; just like certain best-selling books now have a graphic novel versions-Twilight Saga, Skeleton Key, Maximum Ride etc.- targeted for reluctant readers and fanatics of graphic novel literature,  MAUS approaches the telling of a crazy time in history by delivering it through a method that softens the hard blow of the story's reality (it has been proven that graphic novels are more likely to be read by reluctant readers and helps the reading process for those who don't like to read). History is tough enough in the classroom and even harder to read from a textbook but, when read through a graphic novel, history somewhat becomes less real and easier to accept and read. The drawback is that the subject matter become watered down but MAUS is sort of an anomaly to this. The subject matter is still sad, and gruesome, and real and the literature is still good literature...the drawings are pretty vivid as well. The appeal of the book derives from the heart of the author; history buffs will enjoy the book because of its honesty and light touches of deprecating humor while new readers or students who have teachers assign the novel as work or textbook (this is my third semester of having this book as required reading 1.) Holocaust and Representation 2.) History of the Holocaust 3.) SLIS 5420) will be grateful for the opportunity to read a novel that they may never have picked up or given a thought, let alone a second thought.

           

Implementation of Book in Library Setting

            This novel is a great book to introduce The Holocaust to kids about to enter High School. It would be a great conversation starter on the subject of genocide, war, and the implications of both in the world. It would be a great introduction to Graphic Novels and showing that not all Graphic Novels are about Superman or Anime.

           

Reviews

            “…When critics of Maus do examine questions of form, they often focus on the cultural connotations of comics rather than on the form's aesthetic capabilities--its innovations with space and temporality.(n6) Paul Buhle, for instance, claims, "More than a few readers have described [Maus] as the most compelling of any [Holocaust] depiction, perhaps because only the caricatured quality of comic art is equal to the seeming unreality of an experience beyond all reason" (16). Where Michael Rothberg contends, "By situating a nonfictional story in a highly mediated, unreal, 'comic' space, Spiegelman captures the hyperintensity of Auschwitz" (206), Stephen Tabachnick suggests that Maus may work "because it depicts what was all too real, however unbelievable, in a tightly controlled and brutally stark manner. The black and white quality of Maus's graphics reminds one of newsprint" (155). But all such analyses posit too direct a relationship between form and content (unreal form, unreal content; all too real form, all too real content), a directness that Spiegelman explicitly rejects.(n7)

As with all cultural production that faces the issue of genocide, Spiegelman's text turns us to fundamental questions about the function of art and aesthetics (as well as to related questions about the knowability and the transmission of history: as Hayden White asserts, "Maus manages to raise all of the crucial issues regarding the 'limits of representation' in general" [42]). Adorno famously interrogated the fraught relation of aesthetics and Holocaust representation in two essays from 1949, "Cultural Criticism and Society" and "After Auschwitz"--and later in the enormously valuable "Commitment" (1962), which has been the basis of some recent important meditations on form.(n8) In "Cultural Criticism" Adorno charges, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (34).(n9) We may understand what is at stake as a question of betrayal: Adorno worries about how suffering can be given a voice in art "without immediately being betrayed by it" ("Commitment" 312); we must recognize "the possibility of knowing history," Cathy Caruth writes, "as a deeply ethical dilemma: the unremitting problem of how not to betray the past" (27, Caruth's italics). I argue that Maus, far from betraying the past, engages this ethical dilemma through its form. Elaborating tropes like "the presence of the past" through the formal complexities of what Spiegelman calls the "stylistic surface" of a page (Complete Maus),(n10) I will consider how Maus represents history through the time and space of the comics page….”- Chute, H.

APA Citation

Chute, H. (2006). The Shadow of a Past Time": History and Graphic Representation in "Maus. Twentieth Century Literature, 52(2), 199-230.

Spiegelman, A., & Spiegelman, A. (1986). Maus: 1. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.