LCN617 – Children’s Literature: Criticism and Practice. 2015.Coordinator: Erica Hateley, erica.hateley@qut.edu.au

WEEK 2: ECHOES OF THE PAST

Start thinking about children’s literature as a cultural tradition

Think about that tradition as one which is marked by repetition – of stories, of genres, etc.

Consciously engage with the ways that individual texts signal their awareness of that tradition

Think about genres such as “fairy tales” as important for young people’s cultural repertoire

GOALS OF THE LECTURE

Intertextuality: relationships between texts—often linguistically explicit (quotation, citation, allusion), or general narrative (adaptation, retelling)

“In the process of making meaning with a particular text, we know that children (and adults) have recourse to a battery of intertextual phenomena, calling upon, for example, their knowledge of previously read fi ctions, visual texts—fi lm, illustration and TV programmes, texts of popular culture—cartoon, video, comic books, advertisements and songs [...], and that they do so at many levels of textual engagement such as plot structures, character and character motivation, language and language patterns, themes and illustrations.” (Wilkie-Stibbs 181)

INTERTEXTUALITY & INFLUENCES

Within particular texts, there may be repetition of elements, language, or ideas

Between texts, there may be repetition of elements, language, or ideas

“repetition allows young readers to develop schemata for making sense of the stories they hear” (Nodelman and Reimer 205)

REPETITION IS NOT NECESSARILY A BAD THING…

DIDACTICISM…

Arguably, all children’s stories are in some sense educational

Historically, this was overtly true

Over time, entertainment has become more obviously the goal of children’s stories--with the educational aspect seeming to recede

As our understanding of childhood changes, so does our understanding of children’s literature

“K” IS FOR…?The further away

in time/place a text is from our own, the more easily we can register its socio-cultural values

Children’s literature acts as both mirror and shaper of socio-cultural values

1727 New England Primer

1777 New England Primer

Closure (according to Stephens):

Who is rewarded? Why?Who is punished? Why?“The moral of the tale…”

Questions of social values being encoded through “plot” are more likely to be relevant to fairy tales than to fables.

Next week we’ll be looking at narration, and “hero” stories while extending our notion of fantasy.

NARRATIVE/PLOT AS AN EDUCATIONAL STRATEGY…

“Fairy tales are wish-fulfillment fantasies in which characters get what they want and are happy with it. Fables tend to be stories about how characters are wrong to want what they want and learn their

error by getting the object of their desire. Fiction for children, rooted

historically both in the tradition of fables and in the tradition of fairy tales, seems to represent an ambivalent combination

of the two opposite tendencies.” (Nodelman 81)

FABLES & FAIRY TALES

Work hard; be self-reliantSize matters less than ability when giving help

“There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth”

“Slow but steady wins the race.”Are these the “morals” of the fables you learned as a child?

WHAT DO WE LEARN FROM AESOP’S FABLES?

Don’t play with matches

Don’t suck your thumb

One lesson of both seems to be that it is important to listen to adults?

BUT, what are the assumptions about how children learn?

STRUWWELPETER: PARODIC FABLES?

1970

“Moral: Children, especially attractive, well bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf. I say "wolf," but there are various kinds of wolves. There are also those who are charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet, who pursue young women at home and in the streets. And unfortunately, it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous ones of all.” (Perrault)

And, from the Grimms?

WHAT DO WE LEARN FROM PERRAULT AND GRIMMS?

“the fairy tale has become totally institutionalized in our society, part of the public sphere, with its own specifi c code and forms through which we communicate about social and psychic phenomena. We initiate children and expect them to learn the fairy-tale code as part of our responsibil ity in the civil izing process. This code has its keywords and keymarks, but it is not a static code.” (Zipes 29)

Reading more than one version of a tale can help us track some of the changes; allows us to compare and contrast diff erent visions of one plot/story; it also allows us to start thinking about diff erent visions of social values (i.e. gender, race, class),

1697 Charles Perrault’s Tales from Mother Goose1756 Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont’s “Beauty

and the Beast”1812 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Children’s and

Household Tales1835 Hans Christian Andersen’s Tales, Told for

Children1869 Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book1888 Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales1890 Joseph Jacobs’s English Fairy Tales

KEY DATES IN THE HISTORY OF THE LITERARY FAIRY TALE

Some prompts for your thinking about the didactic children's literature , and which may help you formulate some thoughts to share with us about the material : to what extent are these texts famil iar to you? to what extent to they seem to be "chi ldren's l i terature" by current

standards? are the expl icit lessons coincident with current values? do you perceive such tradit ions as relevant to contemporary chi ldhood? what might these texts suggest about the meaning and signifi cance of

chi ldhood?

What do you think might account for the recent prol i feration of fairy tale adaptations in adolescent & adult popular culture?

Thinking ‘ intertextual ly’—how do you relate to intertextual references in cultural works (whether i t is intertextual ly saturated, l ike The Simpsons , or a more focussed adaptation, such as a fi lm version of a novel)? Do you fi nd them pleasurable? Annoying?

The chi ld “should be given the opportunity to slowly make a fairy tale his own by bringing his own associations to and into it . This, incidental ly, is the reason why i l lustrated storybooks, so much preferred by both modern adults and chi ldren, do not serve the chi ld’s best needs. The i l lustrations are distracting rather than helpful” (Bettelheim 59). Do you agree? Disagree?

DISCUSSION PROMPTS

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales . 1976. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.

Nodelman, Perry. The Hidden Adult: Defi ning Children’s Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2008.

Nodelman, Perry and Mavis Reimer. The Pleasures of Children’s Literature. 3rd ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003.

Stephens, John. “Glossary.” From Picture Book to Literary Theory. Sydney: St. Clair Press, 1994. 50-55.

Wilkie-Stibbs, Christine. “Intertextuality and the Child Reader.” International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. Ed. Peter Hunt. New York: Routledge, 2004. 179-190.

Zipes, Jack. “The Changing Function of the Fairy Tale.” Lion and the Unicorn 12.2 (1988): 7-31.

WORKS CITED: