Abstract:
Plainsong or Polyphony?
Australian Award Winning Novels of the 1990s
for Adolescent Readers.
Using a musical metaphor of plainsong (to allude to monophonic sameness)
and polyphony (to allude to multiphonic difference) this thesis seeks evidence
of similarity (plainsong) or difference (polyphony). The texts considered are
judged to have both literary merit and to meet the particular needs of
Australian adolescent readers. Adult concerns about the suitability of particular
Young Adult (YA) novels imply that there is an agreed archetype for this genre;
an implication that this thesis explores using variety of critical perspectives,
chiefly Narrative Theory, Reader Theory, Althusser’s concept of the hail and the
work of Pecheux.
Bakhtin(1981) applied the musical metaphor of polyphony to describe the
novel as a genre in which an author orchestrates its themes through ‘the social
diversity of speech types’ and ‘the differing individual voices that flourish
under such conditions’ (p. 263). This study considers both polyphony and its
opposite, plainsong, in its inquiry into two aspects of individual authorial
voices. The first relates to the authors’ representations of adolescence as
portrayed through their protagonist[s]; the second to the authors’ beliefs about
their adolescent readers as reflected in the various ways each author tries to
attract and engage their audience.
This study finds that whilst patterns of similarity exist in the texts, these
patterns shift when the novels are viewed from different critical perspectives.
This thesis demonstrates that whilst the authors appear to share similar ideas
about adolescence, they have different perceptions about what they can and
cannot do in novels addressed to adolescent readers.
