ABSTRACT
In the last chapter, we examined some of the readings our students made of the popular texts that they consumed in the contexts of home and leisure time. This chapter offers a more extended case study, based not on reading but on writing. We want to focus on one long story written by a year-10 student called ‘Ponyboy’. ‘Pony’ is in fact a working-class Greek Cypriot boy whose real name is Michael-or rather Michaelis. Michael had assumed the name of Ponyboy Curtis, the hero of S.E.Hinton’s novel The Outsiders, at the age of 12, and had obstinately refused to be addressed otherwise ever since. As we shall go on to argue, this question of fantasy identities was also central to his writing, and in particular to the story that we shall be considering.
