CONTEXT: This is a re-post of an earlier rant. It was originally a response to a text-post from someone who mentioned that their YA lit professor called John Green a revolutionary who brought back the YA genre and made it cool again. I…disagree, as you might imagine.
To be clear: the OP was not the target of any of the commentary involved; they were reporting the comments of a professor. But they are feeling a little overwhelmed by the attention that the post has gotten, and have asked nicely to be removed from the discussion.
You should read Steph’s excellent rebuttal about the history of YA lit and the multitudes contained within the genre first, since that’s what I was building off of:
Say what you will about Stephenie Meyer and the Twilight series, but the boom in YA? The point around 2005 where it EXPLODED and started pumping out book after book? It was because of that series. Whatever your feelings about it are, it blew open the doors for publishers to take bigger risks and try different things in YA. It proved a YA series could, in fact, be “the next Harry Potter.” (Fun Fact: Meyer and Green have the exact same literary agent!)
So to see that someone who knows literature, someone like a collegiate literature/writing professor, is saying that John Green is THE revolutionary who “brought back” the young adult novel? Oh my god that makes me so upset.
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ALL OF THIS.
And can we talk about how conveniently, the supposed savior of YA is a guy? Can we talk about how the three best-selling YA series in the past few decades—Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games—were all written by women, but John Green is the one that saved the genre? Can we talk about how incredibly culturally influential Harry Potter has been, how many young kids only got into reading because they wanted to read Harry Potter, how fan culture around Harry Potter has spurred on a new generation of writers, and yet John Green is the revolutionary?
Can we talk about how the only reason people freak-the-fuck-out about YA being “dominated” by female authors writing for girls is because traditionally, “YA for boys” was just called “literature”? Can we talk about how Tamora Pierce and JK Rowling are YA but Patrick Rothfuss and Lev Grossman are Serious Fantasy?
Can we talk about how this is not just a YA issue? How the incisive cultural commentary of Jane Austen is even now dismissed as vapid chick lit with male students barely deigning to force themselves through it for an English credit, but Tolstoy and Flaubert and Ibsen, who also wrote about romance and social constraints placed on women and unrequited love and the treachery of upper class society, are revered?
Can we talk about how stories of boys becoming men are called Bildungsromans and make their way to syllabi around the continent, but stories of girls becoming women are called shallow and insubstantial? How Nora Roberts has to write her wildly popular In Death series under a male-sounding pseudonym while John Grishom and Dan Brown pump out book after book after book that are literally just the same plot with different character names to great acclaim?
Can we talk about how, of all the romance that exists on the market, Nicholas Sparks’ formulaic saccharine “dude with a boat and a puppy” drivel is the stuff that gets adapted into movies year after year after year?
It doesn’t surprise me that the prof would laud Green over all the writers who came before him who paved the way. Literature writers, by and large, skew male. And they tend to write about books written by men, and tend to interview those male authors. If all you know about YA is the stuff you got in mainstream reporting in the last few years, of course you would think that nothing worthwhile in YA existed before Green.
But if I were in that class, and the prof exhibited so little critical thinking about the state of the industry and its social politics and understanding of literary history, I would definitely think thrice before taking that professor’s word on anything else.
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PS: I have nothing against John Green. He seems like a very nice person, and has handled his fame with grace. This is not a “bashing John Green" post. This is a "the media’s treatment of John Green’s status in the genre is symptomatic of pervasive systemic prejudices in the industry" post. But that’s slightly less catchy.
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On John Green, genre revolutionaries and sexism in lit
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