Kendall Henderson: Final Paper Topic Proposal

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For the Critical Response Research Paper, I want to examine how portrayals of adolescents in low-income homes affect adolescent literature readers from low-income backgrounds or home lives. I want to further try and answer these questions through my research: Do protagonists with low-income backgrounds encourage adolescents from low-income backgrounds to read more frequently/increase interest in reading? How does representation affect readership/enthusiasm for reading? Why has it become more common to have protagonists come from low-income backgrounds? How do low-income protagonists reflect the society in which their work takes place? How can readers apply the depictions of low-income protagonists to the world around them? Does reading about low-income protagonists increase self-esteem or empowerment for low-income adolescent readers? What do low-income protagonists teach non-low-income adolescent readers? How are protagonists from low-income homes portrayed differently than supporting characters from low-income homes, and what does this say to the reader?

I don't know a ton about why authors of adolescent lit seem to increasingly choose to set their stories in low-income areas or focus on protagonists from low-income homes, but it seems to me that it's an easy way to reflect the "underdog" characterization that adolescent lit protagonists often seem to have. It might also be a result of increasingly dystopian stories in which the protagonists and their families are the oppressed lower-class who seek revolution/uprising or common anxiety about the global economy and America's poverty epidemic in particular. I think for a non-low-income reader, reading characters who are low-income conveys a sense of struggle that feels universal for adolescents and an inspiring possibility for empowerment and action, but I'm curious how seeing portrayals of low-income characters affects low-income readers particularly. I want to look closer at what readers who identify with these characters' home life or financial situation feel and see when they read these stories outside of symbolic disadvantage.

Books we've read this semester that come to mind are The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, The Hunger Games, The World Made Straight, and to an extent Crank. I want to find as many scholarly journal articles as possible but I think the use of blog posts by librarians or news/media publications might be helpful because in my preliminary Googling those seem to be the sources that most directly address the issue. From what I've read so far, I think my claim is going to be something along the lines of seeing representation in literature is empowering for low-income students. I think I'll find some support for this in journal articles, but I foresee my biggest issue being finding articles that are really relevant to my topic.

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