How do you ensure that young people enjoy reading? Aidan Chambers, British writer of youth literature and a leading voice in the reading promotion, had the answer: by taking them seriously and teaching them to talk about literature. For the ideas and method of Chambers, no one who works in a library or literature education is still possible, although they are more than thirty years, and Chambers died on Sunday at the age of 90.
Chambers called it the ‘tell once’ method: ask a young person to tell about his or her experience and feeling with a read book. Then the young reader involves the story in himself and the fiction gets meaning in reality. That method broke, in the nineties, with the prevailing tradition in literature education, which was focused on closereading and analysis. But reading must be a creative activity, chambers propagated, it is precisely among young people to recognize and identify with stories of the highest interest. “I know from my personal experiences and my experiences as a teacher that you only become a devoted literary reader when you find yourself in printed literature,” he once wrote. “You may read the texts prescribed by school and talk and write about it well enough to get your exams, but you don’t read to live.” Until you are rared by literature.
In that view, Aidan Chambers (1934) also wrote his own books: after three youth novels that he considered less successful, he published in 1978 Breakagehis breakthrough, which also re -formed his views on youth literature. What is the one of the youth literature? Literature specially written for young people, because they themselves are not able to do that – he thought. But his fourth book ‘was for nor for the benefit of juvenile readers written; The only correct description was that it is a book by Young people was, “he later reflected in a lecture.” It was not about an act of self -expression, but about writing from an urgent need, “he experienced. “The only thing that counted was the book itself.”
Loved
That led to uncompromising youth books with which he made a big impression in the eighties and nineties, such as You have to dance on my grave (1982), Tyrants (1983) and The toll bridge (1992). His books distinguished themselves by their form: he enjoyed form experiments, mixed text species, used time jumps and prospects for prospects. If it was confused, it was appropriate because the (teenage) life is simply confusing. And because Chambers did not bake sweet sandwiches: he followed the distinction made by literary scientists between ‘writers’ and’ authors’, whereby the first tunes his text to his audience and is the second more autonomous – that became Chambers’ ideal. “Of course I would like to be read, but when I write I don’t take a blow. There are already piles of books that behave nicely. They are bored to me,” he once said in de Volkskrant.
Young people can be confronted with complicated, large feelings and moral issues, Chambers thought
You can confront young people with complicated, large feelings and moral issues, found Chambers: they are in the phase of life in which they are pre -eminently receptive. So it went in You have to dance on my gravehis best -known book, about a romance between two boys, one of whom died after a fight – it was seen as pioneering youth literature, also because it was about a homosexual relationship without problematizing that. Chambers’ ninth and last youth novel This is all (2007) was a huge novel in six parts with a comprehensive ambition, about twenty -year -old Cordelia, who says goodbye to her teenage years and turns to her unborn child. Uncompromising chambers pulled everything out of the closet – which also led to the question (and a negative answer) or “those artificial handles in reviews [zijn] To tell a good story? ” And his hyper -intelligent, high -drying, Shakespeare reading Bollebozen were not exactly young youngsters.
But the fact that he set the bar so high, especially received appreciation. Chambers perhaps enjoyed even more internationally than in his own United Kingdom; in the Netherlands, where he also his youth book Nothing is what it seems (2000) he was very loved. From the beginning of his writership he won silver Griffels, he made friendships with youth literature writers such as Ted van Lieshout and Bart Moeyaert, who also shared Chambers’ youth literature views. The ideas crossed the literature and are therefore Chambers’ most influential inheritance: his reading promoter guide Reading talk Is still available from stock.