Writing talk

Subtitle:constructions of adolescence in the early genesis of Aidan Chambers’ Dance sequence novels

This dissertation demonstrates how the Young Adult (YA) novels of Aidan Chambers’ Dance Sequence interrelate to and expand upon his “Tell Me” approach to teaching literature in primary-school classrooms. The literature pedagogy behind the Dance Sequence is a more advanced form of “Tell Me” that Chambers portrayed in his YA fiction as being suitable to the secondary-school level. The adolescent narrator-protagonists of Breaktime (1978) and Dance On My Grave (1982) are constructed by Chambers as highly literate, self-expressive, intensely emotive, and affected readers and writers of literary texts. They practice literary authorship in a manner that this dissertation names “writing talk.” In the genesis of the Dance Sequence’s first two novels, Chambers himself also practiced writing talk. Writing talk is a dialogic practice of authorship that grows out of and complements the intergenerational “booktalk” conversation at the heart of the “Tell Me” approach. Using methods of literary genetic criticism with a focus on how the idea of age emerged in Chambers’ novels throughout his process of creating them, this dissertation compares the middle-aged author’s writing process with how he depicts the adolescent narrator-protagonists of his novels as the metafictional authors of his novels. This comparative, age-focused genetic analysis reveals that practices and affects of literary authorship in Breaktime and Dance On My Grave differ little depending on the author’s age. Through genetic analysis that seeks out dialogic moments that resemble booktalk in Chambers’ real and his narrator-protagonists’ metafictional authorship practice, this dissertation identifies the centrality of affect in Chambers’ approach to writing YA fiction. This affective genetic study of writing talk identifies more kinship than difference between adolescence and adulthood in Breaktime and Dance On My Grave than the author himself might have realized. Thus, this dissertation’s genetic analysis nuances Chambers’ own theory of “infusion,” or blending differently-aged consciousnesses in a single text, which is a technique that he describes himself using in the genesis of his YA fiction. Another outcome of this analysis is to show that authorship, similarly to adolescence in Chambers’ oeuvre, has its own affect. Literary genetic criticism should also account for the embodied feelings of authors, especially when affect, self-expression, booktalk, and writing talk are essential elements in the genesis of a literary text. Reconstructing how Chambers combined pedagogy, dialogism, and affect in his process of writing YA fiction brings this methodological intervention to the fore.

Publication year:2022

Keywords:Doctoral thesis

Accessibility:Embargoed