Giant Despair Meets Hopeful: Kristevan Readings in Adolescent Fiction

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Because young-adult fiction is a more recent subset of the larger field
of juvenile literature, it lacks a large body of literary criticism.
Unfortunately, while Giant Despair Meets Hopeful, by Sister Agnes Martha
Westwater, professor emeritus of English at Mount St. Vincent
University, is a fine piece of academic writing, its contents will not
be readily accessible to most readers.

Westwater contends in her introduction that “reading several
contemporary novelists in the light of Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic
theory might increase our awareness of the need for a more serious study
of literature written for young people.” She states further her
twofold purpose: “In these ‘readings’ I want primarily to
demonstrate the literary value of several modern fiction writers who
dared to unmask for the young the constructed nature of reality and to
question the unitary nature of the self.... Secondly, I want to
celebrate the psychoanalytic theory of Julia Kristeva, specifically her
thinking on the illusionary nature of the self, as her theory appears,
sometimes eerily in the novels of these writers.”

The six writers Westwater selected—Patricia Wrightson, Kevin Major,
Katherine Paterson, Aidan Chambers, Robert Cormier, and Jan Mark—were
chosen because they “celebrate life and hope while at the same time
offering profound, sometimes disturbing insights into the consequences
of cowardice which refuses to accept the ordinary burdens of
humanity.” More specifically, the novelists had to meet two criteria:
“the novelist, while being realist, had to combat despair; and the
writer had to be of acknowledged literary discernment, that
acknowledgement validated by the writer’s receipt of a major national
award.” Each of the authors is treated in a single chapter in which
Westwater focuses on only one aspect of Kristevan theory.

Westwater describes Julia Kristeva as a
“literary-critic-turned-psychoanalyst” whose “writings are
extremely dense.” Unfortunately, because Westwater does little to
alleviate that density, readers who are unfamiliar with the contents of
Kristeva’s numerous books will not be in a position to judge the
validity of Westwater’s assessments of the young-adult authors’
works. While Giant Despair Meets Hopeful would be an excellent book
around which to develop a graduate seminar course, it will not find a
large audience outside an academic library.