Formats of Belief: Documentary Form and Adolescent Credibility in Young Adult Fiction

In this thesis, I examine Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, Val Emmich et al.'s Dear Evan Hansen, Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl, Alice Oseman's Radio Silence, and Avi's Nothing But the Truth to argue that young adult fiction imagines adolescence through documentary and platform-coded forms, where letters, memos, transcripts, announcements, and fan-texts convert feeling into legible evidence before the self can consolidate into secure interiority. Although criticism on YA power, testimony, documentary mediation, and publics remains substantial, I locate a lacuna at the level of literary form: scholars seldom explain how embedded records move between affect, institutional procedure, and public circulation within the same novel, so I ask how these texts stage credibility as labor and why truth depends less on sincerity than on institutional recognizability. Using comparative close reading, I synthesize YA theory, testimony theory, documentary and remediation theory, and concepts of publics and cultural capital to track what I call media events, moments when a record acquires a new audience or standing, and I show that silence, speech, authorship, and publicity become precarious strategies within schools and adjacent publics that reward coherence, punctuality, and format compliance. I ultimately argue that these novels represent adolescent subjectivity not as self-discovery but as credibility work performed under evaluative scrutiny, where institutions and manufactured publics authorize simplified accounts, punish fragmentation or delay, and translate students into reputational artifacts; by clarifying how literary form distributes belief, my study shows why YA narrative offers an account of education, mediation, and the unequal politics of being believed.