International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

Level 5:

reviewing the whole work as a construct or fabrication

At the fifth stage of seeing the whole work as a construct and matching one’s world view
with that presented by the text, readers not only recognise that the text offers an
evaluation of behaviour but they go on to actively evaluate that textual evaluation of
behaviour. Readers at this level are aware that the values underpinning a text can be
accepted or rejected, as illustrated by this comment from a 14-year-old boy:

The author shows his feelings about the world from his experience. The author’s

view dictates what happens. The important thing is not just what the characters do

but what the author tries to show about people by what he has them do. You’re

thinking about what you read in the book. Your view might be the same as the

author’s, but it may be the opposite.

Here is an example of a 16-year-old girl resisting the clichéd values of a genre of fiction
she feels she has outgrown:

The teenage romances I’ve read all end up the same way. The girl gets the boy or,

from the boy’s point of view, the boy gets the girl. If it begins with a girl saying to

herself ‘I’ve loved Joe for so long’, you know she’ll get him in the end, or someone

better. If they were more true to life and had a more varied story line I’d like them

better.

Level 6:

consciously considered relationship with the text, recognition of textual

ideology, and understanding of self and of one’s own reading processes

At this stage readers are not only interested in analysing the text as a construct, but
also in considering the ideological implications of its constructedness and in reflexively
exploring their own identities and their own reading processes. This reflective and
reflexive thinking about the way texts work as structures of cultural transmission, and
about the way they work on texts to interpret them, confers considerable power on
readers. They can direct and control their own thinking when they are conscious of it,
and control over their own thinking and over the rhetoric of texts gives them more power
to operate effectively in their society as makers of culture rather than as passive
receivers of it.
Here is an example of a 14-year-old analysing and arguing against the textual ideology
of C.S.Lewis’s Narnia books. He shows that he sees the whole work as a construct, and
there is an explicit recognition of the implied author and of the relationship between the
implied author and the implied reader.

C.S.Lewis’s Narnia books are good for young readers because of the happy endings,

but he leaves out rational analysis of the characters. Edmund does bad things in

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but he always makes up for them by

rescuing people out of the clutches of evil and becomes completely good. Eustace in

582 TEENAGERS READING: DEVELOPMENTAL STAGES OF READING LITERATURE