Articles & Chapters by Roberta Trites
English Journal, 2019
This article argues for the value of preparing students to identify the presence of neoliberal id... more This article argues for the value of preparing students to identify the presence of neoliberal ideologies that amplify racial stratification by defining entire groups of people as “disposable” The authors examine a YA dystopian novel to demonstrate how the text can be interpreted as a critique of neoliberalism.
Papers by Roberta Trites
First Opinions, Second Reactions, 2010
English Journal
Two professors address the consequences of withholding knowledge from young people and offer a ra... more Two professors address the consequences of withholding knowledge from young people and offer a rationale for teaching challenged books and talking points for teachers and librarians.
Children's Literature Association Quarterly
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature
Literary Conceptualizations of Growth
Literary Conceptualizations of Growth
Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction
In this chapter, Sean P. Connors and Roberta Seelinger Trites argue that “neoliberalism has influ... more In this chapter, Sean P. Connors and Roberta Seelinger Trites argue that “neoliberalism has influenced the erasure of race” in contemporary YA dystopian fiction. They devise a framework for determining if a YA novel critiques or condones neoliberalism and, thus, “whether it is reproducing, complicating, or resisting” neoliberal ideologies. To demonstrate how YA dystopian novels reproduce neoliberalism as a means to privilege the individual and erase race and racist power structure, the essay considers Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans as a counterexample, arguing that Smith’s novel “employs neoliberalism” to challenge “the erasure of race.”
Little Women at 150, 2022
Roberta Seelinger Trites connects the use of The Pilgrim’s Progress in Little Women with the essa... more Roberta Seelinger Trites connects the use of The Pilgrim’s Progress in Little Women with the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. She argues that Alcott “uses The Pilgrim’s Progress to articulate a number of very Emersonian principles. In that sense, The Pilgrim’s Progress serves as an intertextual palimpsest painted over various Transcendental texts in Little Women. Alcott appears to have used The Pilgrim’s Progress to hide her Transcendental agenda.” Alcott, Trites argues, “relied on a text popular with the reading public, an alternative text to Emerson’s essays that superficially demonstrated many of the same values but that was more accessible to juvenile readers: John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.” By doing so, “Alcott creates a philosophical space in which her female characters can articulate ideas about language, nature, and self—and without fear of censure.”
Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 2018
Barnboken, Dec 19, 2014
Maria Nikolajeva's Reading for Learning: Cognitive Approaches to Children's Literature (2014) mak... more Maria Nikolajeva's Reading for Learning: Cognitive Approaches to Children's Literature (2014) makes a compelling argument for the usefulness of cognitive literary theory in the analysis of children's literature. Nikolajeva positions her work as an effort to bridge the disciplines of educational theory and literary study, asking this: "If literature is [...] a powerful implement for enlightening the reader, for conveying knowledge, for building citizenship, how exactly does this work; what is the mechanism of the epistemic value of literature specifically targeting an audience that purportedly has a different cognitive capacity than the sender?" (3). Nikolajeva believes that cognitive criticism helps answer these questions. She defines cognitive criticism as "a cross-disciplinary approach to reading, literacy, and literature that suggests rethinking the literary activity as such [...], including interaction between readers and works of literature, but also the ways literary texts are constructed to maximise, or perhaps rather optimise reader engagement" (4, italics in the original). Within this paradigm, cognitive literary criticism involves not only the interactions between readers and authors, but also "the relationship between representation and its referent in the perceptible world" (4). She acknowledges that "while reader-response theories deal with how readers interact or transact with fiction, cognitive criticism also encompasses the question of why this interaction/transaction is possible" (8). Key concepts throughout the book interrogate representation, perception, temporality, memory, and other aspects of cognition, including emotion, dreaming, and ethical decision-making. That cognition is an embodied phenomenon is also a foundational assumption in this work: "Our engagement with fiction is not transcendental; it is firmly anchored in the body, both within the body and the body's position in space and time" (10).
Studies in the Novel, 2015
The Lion and the Unicorn, 1994
International Research in Children's Literature, 2012
Cognitive narratology provides a way to explore discourse as the product of embodied beings as it... more Cognitive narratology provides a way to explore discourse as the product of embodied beings as it simultaneously affects those embodied beings. Cognitive narratology specifically investigates how embodiment influences both the author's discursive creation of story and its subsequent meaning-making as a function of the reader's cognition. This essay explores three aspects of cognitive narratology pertinent to adolescent literature: metaphor, scripts, and blending – all of which are biologically and culturally situated cognitive processes. The essay first examines embodied theories of character growth within the field of adolescent literature before moving to a close reading of Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why to illustrate the relationships between embodied metaphors, scripts, and blending. Thirteen Reasons Why demonstrates how the process of blending allows authors to fuse embodied metaphors and scripts into new narratives about adolescent growth. At stake are interpreti...
Children's Literature, 1995
Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 2014
Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 2008
Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 2013
Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 2011
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Articles & Chapters by Roberta Trites
Papers by Roberta Trites