Campus Event Journal: Maze Runner FIWD

13 11 2014

One of the Friday is Writing Day events that I attended this semester was the marathon reading of Maze Runner. Honestly, I wasn’t a huge fan of the book, even after I borrowed a copy from a friend and tried to read through it from the beginning. Some of what we talk about in our class is the difference between more “literary” and more “popular” fiction. Millions (and I just made this number up) of stories were published in magazines in the time period that we’re studying, and part of a literary recoverist’s (now making words up) job is to separate the high-quality, groundbreaking fiction from the more formulaic popular fiction. Personally, I thought that Maze Runner was definitely a lower-quality work, even for a children’s book. Last month, SNL did a skit (linked here) that exploited a lot of the tropes that exist in today’s popular adolescent fiction (especially Maze Runner, Divergent, The Giver, Harry Potter, and The Hunger Games). Although there may be good arguments for some of these titles’ literary merit, I thought the skit did a pretty good job of uncovering the formula for a successful, if sometimes empty, modern work of adolescent fiction.


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