Exploring the Power of Names in Young Adult Literature, Slides of Literature

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NAMES AND NAMING

IN

YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

“Hwæt”: The First Word of Beowulf

on Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wrist

• Teenagers are vitally involved in

developing their own identities as they say goodbye to who they were as children and hello to who they will be as adults.

• Their names are an important part of

their identities both in real life and in literature.

• Because of this, we believe they are

more interested in manipulating and

• Ernest Hemingway’s 1916-1917 high school yearbook showed him experimenting with eight different pen names:
• Ernest Hemingway
• Ernest Miller Hemingway
• Ernest MacNamara Hemingway
• Ernest Monahan Hemingway
• Ernest Hemingway. (with a period)
• Ernest Michealowitch Hemingway
• B. S.
• E. H.

• Leslie Dunkling in The Guiness Book of Names says that except for changing their names in relation to marriage or a desire to separate different parts of their lives, when adults change their names it is usually under a cloud. They want to hide from someone or something.
• In contrast, when young adults change their names it is usually done in a celebratory mood filled with optimism and anticipation, as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

• James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career—when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the Tuolumne and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour.
• I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then.

HERE ARE SIX REASONS

THAT TEENAGERS RESPOND

POSITIVELY TO

AUTHORS WHO ARE

SKILLED IN THE LITERARY

USES OF NAMES.

1. Teenagers are more interested

than are adults in manipulating

and presenting their names:

• Teenagers are closer to the name games they played as children
• The boys in Louis Sachar’s Holes do this when they call Mr. Pendanski, Mom.

• They call the other guard, Mr. Sir, because he told them to address him as Sir..
• In Cynthia Voigt’s When She Hollers, Tonnie tries to humiliate his step daughter, Tish, by reversing the sounds of her name.
• Perceptive readers understand that Tonnie is not only cruel; he is also immature.

2. Place names are not as sacred

as they used to be because

naming rights are now being

sold.

• Authors of books for teens are joining in the fun of getting new mileage out of old place names as in the title of John Green’s Looking for Alaska:

3. Because young adult literature is

contemporary, it can reflect current trends.

Young people who are now becoming

parents are not choosing traditional names

for their babies.

• They are using creative processes of word

play such as clipping, blending, and

reversing words.

• Nevaeh ( Heaven spelled backwards) is now

among the top 100 names given to girls.

• This is similar to the Mirror of Erised in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. It is Desire spelled backwards.
• Donna Jo Napoli clipped the name of Rapunzel to get the title Zel for her retelling of the old story, much like Gail Carson Levine clipped Cinderella’s name for the title of her Ella Enchanted.
• Meg Rosoff made a joke in the title of her 2006 Just in Case. Her protagonist is David Case, but in the first few pages he changes his name to Justin.

4. People are choosing names to

honor, or at least hint at, ethnic

identification as a matter of pride.

• There is more to ethnic explorations than

names, but still such titles as these serve as

miniature “book talks” informing readers that

ethnicity will be explored in the book:

• When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue

Park

• Call Me Maria and The Meaning of

Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer

• Missing Angel Juan by Francesca Lia

Block

• Naming Maya by Uma Krishnaswami
• Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind by

Suzanne Fisher Staples

A SAMPLING FROM THE

CHAPTERS IN OUR BOOK

ILLUSTRATE HOW

AUTHORS MAKE USE OF

DIFFERENT KINDS OF

NAMES

• In Kerr’s Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack, Dinky (a character who is far from Dinky) names the cat she found under a car Nader in honor of Ralph Nader, who as a critic of the American automobile industry, also spent considerable time under cars.
• In Kerr’s Is That You, Miss Blue, she illustrates how the girls at an exclusive southern boarding school for young women come from both old, well established families and from newly affluent families whose land happened to have oil on it by explaining that Carolyn Cardmaker’s roommate is named Cute Diblee, “and Cute isn’t a nickname either. She’s got a sister called Sweet.”

• Cormier’s I Am the Cheese is an example of a book where the names are integral to the plot.
• The metaphor in the title comes from the old nursery song, “The Farmer in the Dell.”
• Farmer is the surname of a family of three who have been assigned to the Government’s witness re- establishment program.

• The parents are killed and the boy, whose name is Adam, is sent to an institution where he is regularly interrogated.
• At the beginning of the book, the family would sing the old song and laugh about how special they were to have a song made up about them.
• This happy time contrasts with the grim ending of the book when readers are left to decide which line is most appropriate: “The cheese stands alone” or “The rat takes the cheese.”

• Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat books are equally powerful but in a “glittering” and “slinkster-cool” fashion.
• The first two pages of the Weetzie Bat chapter entitled “Shangri-L.A.” contain 203 words, with 35% percent of them being names.
• Character names include Weetzie, My Secret Agent Lover Man, Dirk, Duck, Cherokee, and Witch Baby.
• Names of their pets are Slinkster Dog, Go-Go Girl, Pee Wee, Wee Wee, Teenie Wee, Tiki Tee, and Tee Pee.

• Actual names taken from the Los Angeles area include Hollywood Boulevard, Tick Tock Tea Room, Fredericks of Hollywood, Loves, Shangri-la, Shangri Los Angeles, Shangri-L. A., and Hollywood.
• Seasonal names include Christmas and October.
• Celebrity names include Marilyn, Elvis, James Dean, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo, Bogart, and Garbo.
• There is also a literary allusion to Lost Horizons.

Most English and Continental surnames

developed during the Middle Ages were either:

1. Based on place names
2. Descriptions of personal characteristics
3. Descriptions of a person’s occupation
4. Patronyms based on the personal name of a father or another admired person

• Karen Cushman’s Catherine, Called Birdy and The Midwife’s Apprentice are wonderful illustrations of these processes during the latter part of the Middle Ages.
• Her The Ballad of Lucy Whipple shows that the processes were still at work on the frontier of the California Gold Rush.
• The protagonist was named California Morning Whipple by her “Eastern” parents who more than anything want to “Go West.”
• They named her brother Butte, her sisters Prairie and Sierra, and two babies who died Golden Promise and Ocean.

• In Chapter Two, after the decimated family has finally gotten to California, the girl decides to change her name to Lucy May, because back home it was “just a name, like Patience, or Angus or Etta Mae. But in California…. It was a place, a passion, a promise….”
• As she explains in a letter to her grandparents, “I cannot hate California and be California.”
• Her mother says “After twelve years of calling you California, I don’t see how I can suddenly say Lucy any more than I could Bossie or Nelly or Lady Jane.”
• Lucy humbly asks, “Will you try, Mama?”

Chapter Four. Names to Establish Realistic Settings: Gary Soto, Adam Rapp, Meg Rosoff, and Nancy Farmer

• This is probably our most varied chapter.
• It begins with Gary Soto’s Buried Onions, which he describes as a regional book.
• He believes in giving real names to “rivers, mountains, gangs, streets, cars, in short, the particulars of the world.”
• He thinks regionalism should have as much of a place in young adult literature as in the adult literature of Flannery O’Connor, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, William Saroyan, and Bernard Malamud.