ABSTRACT
This chapter is in two sections: Adolescence and Early Adulthood. The first section, Adolescence, is an abbreviation of an earlier chapter written for the first edition of this handbook (Neilsen, 1998b). The earlier chapter, written 8 years ago, focuses on identity creation, and on what I call “touchstone” texts informing the lives of two adolescents in high school. These touchstone texts shape the lives of David and El in ways that suggest that reading in adolescence is an activity of interpolation-whether the texts are film, cultural practices, or literary works, they inhabit the reader and the reader, in turn, writes the texts into his or her life. This earlier chapter, “Adolescence,” suggests that, as educators, we must learn which texts resonate for adolescents and why. Both the substance of “Adolescence” and the theoretical inferences have remained as they were 8 years ago in order to preserve the original data, analyses and theoretical perspectives of both the participants and the researcher in context at that time. The reader is encouraged to read this section as though he or she might be reading it 8 years ago.
