What are “literacy” and “adolescent literature”?

I would say that literacy is a very difficult concept to define because it is so intrinsic to the human experience. Human beings have been constructing and employing linguistic systems for thousands of years and have historically conceptualized the ability to use language as one of the defining attributes of the human species that justified our differentiation from, and in some cases, subjugation of all other species.

I would define literacy as the ability to employ the technology of language to create a desired effect on one’s audience and to make sense of the messages transmitted by others, whether via speech or writing. I often think of language, both written and spoken, as a medium that allows us to convey aspects of our interior existence to others and to respond to their conveyance of their experience. Language can also function as a type of time capsule, allowing for the transmission of ideas across time and space and beyond the scope of a writer’s lifetime. Literacy would be the ability to employ the medium of language to effectively convey one’s perception of the world and to interpret another person’s usage of this medium.

In my view, adolescent literature is a genre comprised of stories that seek to provide insight into the period of life known as adolescence. Adolescent literature typically, though not always, features adolescent characters and is meant to provide entertainment, along with guidance, wisdom and even consolation, to adolescent readers. Writers of adolescent literature often set out to write a book that would have served as a type of “life preserver” for their adolescent selves and, in doing so, hope to ease their readers’ passage through the singular, sometimes baffling, and often challenging period of adolescence.