I've actually liked most of the YA and middle grades panels I've been to. But then, the only panels I've been to have been at professional conventions (CLA and ALA) and the LA Times Festival of Books. The audience of the former was full of YA librarians and wannabe YA librarians (such as me) and the latter was a mixture of the same, teachers, kids/teens, and their parents.
There were times when the panels at the Festival felt a little YALit (or Middle Grade Fiction) 101, but definitely more towards the end of the course rather than the first day. Which seems appropriate to me. The moderators and panelists always made sure that the audience questions were from a mixture of adults and teens (or kid, if it was a middle grades panel).
re: "YA, though, strikes me as being one of the ones in which the history of the genre is largely orthogonal to talking about the genre as it is today."
Yes and no, imho. In my experience, part of the reason why so many of the panels talk about books like The Outsiders (esp the Outsiders) is that until those books were published, YA Lit as a genre did not exist. Teens read books, certainly, but publishers did not publish and market books specifically to teens. A lot of adults that I know that are interested or invested in YA Lit see parallels between that and what is happening now. So the discussions that I've been at haven't been so much about how YA Lit has changed from then to now, but speculation as to what was happening then and what is happening now to create such a dramatic change in the existence/size of YA Lit as a genre.
But then again, this has been at panels were the panelists included Laurie Halse Andersen, Holly Black, John Green, MT Anderson, Lauren Myracle and the like. So the majority of the discussion was always about those authors' books in particular, with the issue you are raising being largely a footnote. When the question of what used to be popular comes up, it's more often a question asked by kids or teens specifically of the authors because, as fans, they are curious about the authors' tastes and what they were like when they were the fans age. And the answers have rarely been about YA Lit in particular, partly because most teens do not read exclusively YA lit and also because this was even more true a decade or two or three ago when the YA section of the bookstores was only a fraction of the size it is now.
no subject
I've actually liked most of the YA and middle grades panels I've been to. But then, the only panels I've been to have been at professional conventions (CLA and ALA) and the LA Times Festival of Books. The audience of the former was full of YA librarians and wannabe YA librarians (such as me) and the latter was a mixture of the same, teachers, kids/teens, and their parents.
There were times when the panels at the Festival felt a little YALit (or Middle Grade Fiction) 101, but definitely more towards the end of the course rather than the first day. Which seems appropriate to me. The moderators and panelists always made sure that the audience questions were from a mixture of adults and teens (or kid, if it was a middle grades panel).
re: "YA, though, strikes me as being one of the ones in which the history of the genre is largely orthogonal to talking about the genre as it is today."
Yes and no, imho. In my experience, part of the reason why so many of the panels talk about books like The Outsiders (esp the Outsiders) is that until those books were published, YA Lit as a genre did not exist. Teens read books, certainly, but publishers did not publish and market books specifically to teens. A lot of adults that I know that are interested or invested in YA Lit see parallels between that and what is happening now. So the discussions that I've been at haven't been so much about how YA Lit has changed from then to now, but speculation as to what was happening then and what is happening now to create such a dramatic change in the existence/size of YA Lit as a genre.
But then again, this has been at panels were the panelists included Laurie Halse Andersen, Holly Black, John Green, MT Anderson, Lauren Myracle and the like. So the majority of the discussion was always about those authors' books in particular, with the issue you are raising being largely a footnote. When the question of what used to be popular comes up, it's more often a question asked by kids or teens specifically of the authors because, as fans, they are curious about the authors' tastes and what they were like when they were the fans age. And the answers have rarely been about YA Lit in particular, partly because most teens do not read exclusively YA lit and also because this was even more true a decade or two or three ago when the YA section of the bookstores was only a fraction of the size it is now.