Young Adult Literature Final Review
Final Exam: Monday, December 10. 1:15-3:55 p.m. @ GEC in library
The exam will consist of two parts:
 Section I: fill in the blanks, multiple choice, short answer,
 Section II: quote and theory identification and application, and text comparisons
Novels/Texts
 Hinton’s The Outsiders
 Anderson’s Wintergirls
 Cormier’s Chocolate War
 St. James’s Freak Show
 Cisneros’s House on Mango Street
 Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian
 Ryan’s Forest of Hands and Teeth
 Baggott’s Pure
 Collins’s Hunger Games
 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Restless”
 Theorists: Trites, Butler, Bordo, Adorno, Marek, Jameson, Cohen, Freud, Pratt
Define and Apply:
 Hegemonic Masculinity
 Compulsory Heterosexuality
 docile body,” abiding gendered self,” historical body
 Culture Industry and passive mass consciousness
 Postmodern “symptoms” (waning of affect, fascination with the present, schizophrenia, loss of historicity,
liberation from anxiety, depthlessness)
 Panopticon
 The Uncanny
 Monstrous double
 Posthumanism/posthuman body
 Monster theory
 Bildungsroman vs. entwicklungsroman
Additional Considerations:
1. According to Trites, at what point does an adolescent “come of age?” How does this fit with Foucault’s
domination-repression model of force?
2. How is “coming of age” problematic for female protagonists, according to Pratt?
3. How does our panopticon-society help sustain the institutions’ systems of power?
4. What do our texts seem to suggest about individuality vs. autonomy? Related question: do the texts seem
to privilege community over complete autonomy?
5. How does discourse shape and/or maintain social systems? Related question: in what ways can personal
narratives/storytelling create a resistance to the Culture Industry and its social institutions?
6. Using Adorno, explain how the culture industry ensures complete quantification.
7. According to Jameson, what is the “supreme formal feature” of the postmodern? How is this illustrated in
Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes vs. Van Gogh’s Peasant Boots/Pair of Boots?
8. According to Cohen, why is it important to study society’s monsters?
9. How does the monster create a category crisis? What does this mean for the institutions in play?
10. In what way does the monster police the borders of the possible?
11. How do home and family function in Freud’s theory of the Uncanny?
12. What is the purpose of the monstrous double?
13. What anxieties does the monstrous, posthuman body reveal? Related question: What connections can be
made between this and the adolescent body?