Justice in Young Adult Speculative Fiction

This book is the first to offer a justice-focused cognitive reading of modern YA speculative fiction in its narrative and filmic forms. It links the expansion of YA speculative fiction in the 20th century with the emergence of human and civil rights movements, with the communitarian revolution in conceptualizations of justice, and with spectacular advances in cognitive sciences as applied to the examination of narrative fiction. Oziewicz argues that complex ideas such as justice are processed by the human mind as cognitive scripts; that scripts, when narrated, take the form of multiply indexable stories; and that YA speculative fiction is currently the largest conceptual testing ground in the forging of justice consciousness for the 21st century world.

"Here, social justice takes its place among other adaptations of justice (poetic, retributive, restorative, environmental, global) as the author traces historical understandings of justice in parallel with the development of science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative YA fiction...Oziewicz draws on his own experience growing up in Poland under a repressive communist government and on his impressively broad knowledge of young adult literature, film, and video games to trace how justice itself has been conceived since ancient times and to explain what cognitive science reveals about how narrative scripts create understanding...Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." - C. A. Bily, Macomb Community College, CHOICE

Autorentext

Marek C. Oziewicz is the Marguerite Henry Professor of Children's and Young Adult Literature at The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. His recent book One Earth, One People (2008) was the recipient of the 2010 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies.

Inhalt

Introduction 1. Toward Modern Justice Consciousness: An Idiosyncratic History of Justice with a Note on the Rise of Young People's Literature 2. How We Know What We Know: Justice Scripts in Literary and Filmic Narratives 3. The World Is Not Fair: Poetic Justice Scripts 4. Find Them and Kill Them: Retributive Justice Scripts 5. No Future without Forgiveness: Restorative Justice Scripts 6. Humans are Animals Too: Environmental Justice Scripts 7. We All Have a Dream: Social Justice Scripts 8. Against Unseen Exploitation: Global Justice Scripts