Changes

The five people who so who actually follow this blog may have noticed that's it has been rather quiet lately. This is partly due to the fact that I've been incredibly busy, but mostly due to the fact that over the last 18 months or so, I've been contemplating some big changes.

Those of you who know me personally know that I'm currently working on a a PhD in English Studies with an emphasis in Children's and Adolescent literature. When I began contemplating this degree I was recently engaged. I didn't have a child. I lived in an apartment on the edge of a sinkhole (not joking). 4 years of PhD program later, I'm a very different person.

That doesn't mean I don't want a PhD, but it does means that my life is more complicated than it was when I first envisioned this process. So for the 2010-11 academic year, I have requested and have been granted a leave of absence.

This means that the university has granted me a year of no dissertation hours(although I plan on continuing) and they will hold my assistantship. The following year, I will then have the option to come back full time and continue my assistantship or to continue part time until I finish.

This is not a decision I made lightly. This is a conversation I have been having with my advisor and handful of people for the last 18 months. I have put off making this decision for a variety of reasons because I knew it carried major implications. I did not want to make this decision in the heat of the moment, or while I was pregnant, or while I was dealing with the sleep deprivation of a newborn, but ultimately over the last year and half I have returned to the same conclusion. I need to finish my PhD for me, but my goal is not to teach in a high pressure academic environment. This does not mean that I will not continue teaching, but it does mean that I will not sacrifice my family for a teaching job that does not allow me to achieve the balance I desire.

I plan to use this next year to figure out what is best not just for me, but also for my family. I would have loved to have talked to many of you about this decision, but due to a complex process and some administration changes, I was not able to discuss it until it was officially approved by the Graduate College. My apologies to those who are caught by surprise by this decision. Academia is a politically charged world and while I would have loved to have told you all this personally, I had to ultimately ensure that I did not burn any bridges.

(Non)Recommeded Reading?

So a few weeks ago, Rakicy and I taught his mom how to use Google Docs. In our demo, we were trying to show her how two people could edit the same document simultaneously. I didn't really feel like typing a large block of text to use as a demo, so I cut and pasted my booklist for my internship proposal.

Fast forward to today...Rakicy's mom calls and says that she read a book on my list and it was really good, so she thinks she might read some more of them. Uh oh! Because they were alphabetical, she started with Joan Bauer's Rules of the Road. This is probably the most conservative book on the list, and lets just say that they go downhill (in terms of lining up with her world view) from there.

Rakicy called her back and said that they may not all be her style. She said, "that's okay, I'll look them up on the internet first." Hmm...do we think that she will find the blog entry about the next book on the list or the very offensive movie poster first. I could go into the Google Doc and delete all of the titles that might offend her, but wait that would be most of the rest of them.

The Associated Press: Study: As gas prices go up, auto deaths decline

The Associated Press: Study: As gas prices go up, auto deaths decline

Last week, I was theorizing on the changes that I've seen in ya road trip novels. One theory that I posited was that the rising cost of gas is making the car less accessible to teens, therefore while the car was once the metaphor for economic growth, it is now being replaced by other things. M suggested this might be a shift toward digital mobility rather than physical mobility, and I think she may be right. Recently there was a study that said that the rising gas prices are helping to cut traffic deaths

with the most dramatic drop likely to be among teen drivers.

I find this interesting for a number of reasons. In terms of actual teen drivers, central Illinois has had a really rough couple of years with teen deaths. Illinois has enacted a graduated driver's license program which hardly makes 16 the target year anymore.

Such a program is really interesting to me because of the ways that it mirrors the trend toward an extended adolescence. Most of my undergraduate students still identify themselves as adolescents on some level and the graduated licensing law seems to reflect such a perception of delayed adulthood.

What I find most intriguing about the study, however, is the fact that teen deaths are the most marked decrease. In ya lit cars are often used as punishment for non-adult behavior. You get pregnant, you instantly lose you car. You have sex, you (or your partner) are in a horrible car wreck. You fail to get/keep a summer job the car is taken away. Then of course we have the car removed for drug/alcohol/other anti-social behavior books a well. Cars do two things in ya lit: they enable adult behaviors (sex, jobs, mobility) and they serve as reminders for the ways in which adolescents must concede to growing up and to abiding by the rules of grown ups.

If actual teen deaths from automobile accidents are dropping, I would assume that authors will begin to find a new metaphor for the need to grow up (economically) and the consequences for unsanctioned behavior. Will this be cell phones or computers? I'm curious how this change will resonate in ya lit.

Two-Way Street: Or Three Theories on Recent Road Trip Novels

Right now I'm reading Lauren Barnholdt's Two Way Street. Although my dissertation is not exclusively about roadtrips, everything I do looks at how adolescence is economically defined. This is not to say that I think it should be economically defined, but rather that ya lit again and again seems to define it in those terms. The car tends to be the metaphor that most often represents this economic definition of adolescence and the movement from child to adult. Because of that, I read a lot of road trip novels. Lately I've noticed some things that I'm not quite sure what to do with.

The classic YA roadtrip novel is Joan Bauer's Rules of the Road. It's not necessarily a classic because of age, but is one of the first that was a) popular and b) was about a teen driving across the country. Bauer's novel doesn't specify the year that the story takes places, but it reads as a look back at an adolescence of an earlier generation. Bauer concentrates on the characters and their development and doesn't spend much time describing the ephemeral conditions of adolescence in Jenna's life. Her novel is about the growth from adolescence, and not surprisingly moves along a north/south trajectory.

In the last 4-5 years, however, there seem to be lots of YA novels that do the exact opposite. Barnholdt's novel reads more like two people in a small space who talk about pop culture (okay, I get that that is probably would a adolescent road trip would look like) who just happen to be moving across the country (north, for those who are interested in my map theory). Jordan's SUV is really just a means of keeping the pair in a small space for a prolonged period of time in which they concentrate mostly on how many pieces of popular culture they can consume simultaneously. This novel will be out of date within a couple of years. For example, Courtney and Jordan spent most of their relationship debating whether Laguna Beach or OC is better. I know teens like it, or at least those pretending to be teens on Amazon's reviews say things like:

this book has the modern twist of what it is really like to be a teen now a days. i like how it goes from the past to the actual trip.

Bernholdt's not alone in this ephemeral move. Andy Behren's All the Way is full of pop culture references and has been made into a MTV movie (with quite possibly the most offensive movie poster I've seen in a very long time) to be released this October. The upside of this production is that it proves my point that in adolescent literature cars are often metaphors for sex because we can't talk about sex and adolescents without getting into censorship issues. The weird side is that the road trip is becoming less and less of a "classic" tradition and more and more of a pop culture plot.

The comment that the trip doesn't become the focus is particularly interesting to me. In some ways that Amazon reader made me think about something that I hadn't realized before--it's becoming less and less about the car. I have three theories about this

1. My theory based on no evidence at the moment: Cars are becoming less and less accessible due to rising gas prices. Pop culture is now more of a solid aspect than the car. YouTube keeps everything accessible, gas prices don't keep cars accessible.
   
2. My more supported theory: the road trip at one time showed literal movement, but now the car itself has become such an accepted metaphor that authors can spend the novel on the pop culture that their readers would be familiar with. Bauer couldn't do this because she was already setting up something new.
3. My cynical theory: more recent road trip novels are written by authors who don't really care about what their novels do in the long term and only care about how many books they will sell this summer. The OC will sell books.
   

That doesn't mean, however, that the vehicle is disappearing. In fact the vehicle seems to becoming present in a variety of novels. Even Scott Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy associates the official sanctioning of hoverboards with the movement into the adult realm. I'm not sure what to do with all of this. I think that there is something going on here, and I'm not sure what it is.