ABSTRACT
Winner of the Printz Honor Award in 2007, The Book Thief has not only received critical acclaim but has also invited burgeoning scholarship that supports the assertion that the novel possesses literary merit. New Literacy Studies (NLS), a movement formed in the 1980s across multiple disciplines including sociology, rhetoric, linguistics, education first began to construct theories that addressed the problems with large-scale assumptions concerning literacy in Western societies. NLS also opposed the idea that literacy is simply an individual act of mental processing, an idea shaped by modern psychological studies that characterized literacy as a series of mental processes such as “decoding, retrieving information, comprehension [and] inferencing”. Literacy is not a neutral and universal concept, but one moderated by various cultural practices and worldviews. S. DeRosa proposed more positive ways of approaching literacy that can help students “become active participants in the construction of their literacy development” and aid them in developing “a sense of critical agency” in their communities.
