PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

In the process of growing up, young people need to make decisions where they try to balance the perspective of their present and their prospective future. Children and teenagers can negotiate with media they use what their life is supposed to be about. Reading books is a common individual leisure activity among German female teenagers and has remained popular for female teenagers in the past two decades. Back in 2013, a book genre called "Young Adult Dystopia" (YA Dystopia) became very popular. Books that were labelled as this new genre sold many millions of book copies worldwide. Remarkably, there is a lack of research that focusses on readers’ perspectives on reading YA Dystopia. Many female teenagers have or will live through their adolescence dealing with ideologies, convictions, or perspectives that they negotiated or negotiate with in context of reading YA Dystopia. Analysing reading YA Dystopia makes it possible to get an insight on teenage reading of YA Dystopia.
The lack of empirical research on properties of YA Dystopia and the process of reading YA Dystopia makes it necessary to incorporate both “constructed” fictional and “non-fictional” data into analysis. This specific demand requires a methodology that is capable of accessing both origins of data. Grounded Theory Methodology relying on paradigmatic roots and a theoretical foundation that is compatible with a constructionist theoretical concept of the literary genre makes it possible to access teenage reading of YA Dystopia. Incorporating additional methods via Situational Analysis into the research design allows to access young readers’ perception of the recent world and their perception of the dystopian world on the same conceptual level.
The design of the research process introduces a specific conjunction of methods in an iterative cycle by aligning them according to their interdependencies in a mixed-method-design. With this foundation it is possible to display concepts that are present in the recent everyday life of young readers but are challenged in YA Dystopia. This process makes it possible to analyse the portrayal of recent deficits in society and politics and the extrapolated potential dangers in YA Dystopia.
In both the recent world of the teenage readers and their portrayal of the life of YA Dystopia protagonists, close relations are an important or the most important thing in life. Close relations can develop when people support, trust, are there and care for each other. However, close relationships are challenged by the living conditions in YA Dystopia where citizens compete against each other. In addition, actions that displease the sovereign can cause harm or death to the people who are close to you. Therefore, close relationships can increase the danger of either getting hurt or killed yourself or getting the people who are close to you hurt or killed.
Overturning the oppressors in YA Dystopia via a violent rebellion limits the chances of reconciliation among all citizens. Hurting or killing people fosters grief among all citizens. The grief threatens future reconciliation because many people will never get over losing people close to them and will continue to hate the people who they consider responsible for their losses.
This research project provides several indications that future German teenagers readers may continue to read YA Dystopia. Even though YA Dystopian films seem to be able to draw attention to this genre, only people that started reading a YA Dystopia seem likely to stay interested in a series. By reading these books, teenage readers face and process contradictions in the discursive positions that they depict in these series. Many will not be exposed to the multitudes of depictions of their properties if they do not talk about YA Dystopia with other teenage readers. Therefore, individual reading YA Dystopia will only foster processing contradictions in terms of the readers' properties of recent life and society.