Class act
STUDENT RESEARCH
Rewriting life stories SPEN C E R S M I T H
How young adult literature can help us understand adolescent development
W
hat do the characters Pi, Ponyboy, and Holden
Caulfield have in common? Besides being the protagonists of three popular novels, they’re also the subject of Spencer Smith’s student thesis. Smith, an English major in the Honors Tutorial College, examined narrative psychology in young adult literature. The relatively new field of narrative psychology views our lives as stories that can be rewritten, Smith explains. “You can imagine a boy who thinks of himself as lazy and doesn’t do work in school,” he says. “What a narrative therapist would do is find times in his life when he hasn’t been lazy, and then start connecting those instances and rewriting a narrative in which the boy is no longer lazy, but productive.” Smith’s thesis discusses how adolescents, specifically males, develop their identities and the way they narrate their lives. He examined three classic young adult books, Life of Pi, The Outsiders, and The Catcher in the Rye, and compares the psychological development of the protagonists to the development of adolescents. The Outsiders and The Catcher in the Rye often are assigned reading in junior high and high school, and Life of Pi— although written for adults—is generally popular among adolescents. Smith chose books with a similar style, but with enough differences to generate discussion. “Although they’re all told in first-person by male protagonists, the narrators differ quite a bit,” he says.
.44
IMAGES: ILLUSTRATION, CHRISTINA ULLMAN; PORTRAIT, TAYLOR EVANS