Deconstructing Children Literature

CONCEPTS TO REMEMBER:
• Children are sufficiently different from adults.
• There exists a literature written specifically for children which attempts to fulfill children¹s needs for special texts.
• Who you are, that is, all the experiences and knowledge you have gained, will influence how you perceive and understand literature, specifically children¹s literature.
• Children¹s literature tends to create special worlds and to evoke moods and feelings unlike those provided by other forms of literature.
• The ability to enjoy literature is a learned skill.
• Readers tend to come from homes where reading occurs.
VOCABULARY:
The implied reader is the person for whom the text is written. In the process of reading and making sense of the text we can construct the characteristics and qualities of the implied reader. In reading and making sense of a text, we can also imagine we are the implied reader and understand the text through [the eyes of] the implied reader.
A repertoire is the knowledge and experiences of life and of other literature which a text assumes the implied reader possesses.
Strategies [of reading] are the ways of thinking about texts which allows us to see the text as meaningful. A set of strategies is part of the repertoire of the implied reader. Strategies for reading a literary text will be covered later in the term.
Intertextuality refers to the link between ideas, images, emotions, stories in different stories. This is like resemblances among people. One person may do or say something which is like or reminds you of another person.
READING AND MAKING-SENSE OF LITERATURE
CONCEPTS TO REMEMBER:
Reading against the text involves thinking about what the text is trying to get us to agree to and then to resist its manipulations.
Consciousness of one¹s owns response to literature and of the response of others to literature is the most basic literary strategy.
In order to facilitate response to literature, we need to develop an understanding of how literary texts provoke response in the reader.
A gap in a text is any aspect of that text that a reader makes sense of by providing knowledge from their pre-existing repertoire.
In reading, we have the expectation of consistency within the story; that is, that everything that is said or done in the story fits together to make a meaningful whole story. When we fit the pieces of a story into a previously held schema, we are participating in consistency-building.
Strategies for building consistency (filing in the gaps) include:
• Concretization - forming mental pictures by imagining, as exactly as the text will allow, what is being described
• Character - information about the personalities of the people the text describes
o flat character - has only one or two readily identifiable traits and those traits do not change
o round character - has a more complex cluster of traits which develops or changes as the story develops
 round character can develop by the text providing new information about the character which causes the reader to see the character differently and in more depth
 round character can develop by events in the story changing the character and making him or her more complicated
• Plot - the sequence of events that makes up the story
o climax -- the culminating point in the story; a series of actions lead up to the culminating point and then the story¹s plot quickly comes to an end
• Theme - meaning(s) or central idea(s) in the story; the strategy of finding meaning in a text consists of:
o Identification - perceiving that a character in the text is like oneself
o Manipulation - recognition that something will happen to the character in the story which will teach the reader a lesson about his or herself
• Structure - the way the various parts of a story relate to each other and form patterns; structure depends on repetition and variation of the same or similar elements
• Focalization - the position of the person who sees and understand the events being described in the story (this is different from the person who is telling the story)
• Point of view - the perspective from which a story is told; Implied speaker - the person who is telling the story and whose personality is suggested by the words of the text
o First-person narrator - the person who is telling the story is the relaying events he or she personally experienced; could be a character in the story or a participant in the action of the story who never really appears as a character in the story itself; "I"
o third-person narrator - the person who is telling the story is someone separate from the events taking place; "he," "she"
Consistency-building within the text as a whole; stories tend to have two plots at once: the series of actions that make up the events the story narrates and the series of actions that make up the narration of those events:
• Discourse - how a story is told: some events in great detail, some events in brief mention, some events in flashback; the order and detail of events in the discourse affects how the reader understands the events of the story.
• Trajectory - the path of the discourse through the story; this is the order in which the author chooses to inform us of what is or has been going on in the story; the order in which the story is revealed to the reader affects how the reader understand the events of the story.
Deconstructing Children's Literature
Approaches to reading a text (Literary Criticism)
-- Methods of deriving meaning from collected words [on a page].
• Reader-Response Approach
o Prior to the reader-response approach, it was believed the text itself held all components of meaning and the reader was to discover that meaning in reading.
o Today we acknowledge that each reader brings their own background and understandings to a text and meaning is derived, in part, through what the reader brings to the reading.
o The reader-response approach attempts to account for the differences in interpretations by seeing the reader and the text as equal partners in the interpretative process. That is, the text is the stimulus which recalls in the reader past experiences and other texts, permitting one to give meaning to the other.
o As experiences and exposure to other literature occur between re-readings of a text, meaning from one reading to another is transactional.
• Historical Approach
o How the period in which a work was written influenced the work itself.
o The effect of external political, social, and intellectual influences on literature.
o How these influences affect writings about an earlier period or future time.
o The historical context can help in the understanding of a work; and vice versa.
• Psychoanalytical Approach
o Examines the work in relationship to its author.
o To probe the unconscious of the characters, to determine what their actions really reveal about them.
o Carl Jung, a student of Freud, believed each person held, in his or her unconscious, archetypes--repeated patterns and images of human experience--which emerge in literature. The archetypes include the changing seasons, the cycle of birth, death, rebirth, the heroic quest, the beautiful temptress, etc.
o The danger in the psychoanalytical approach is in seeing a symbol in every object or act.
• Feminist Approach
o How gender affects a literary work, its writer, and its reader.
o The major concern is male bias in literature.
o The feminist approach is a cultural criticism of how societal norms and attitudes influence subgroup (e.g. female, male) behavior.
• Formalist Approach
o A literary work should be analyzed for meaning apart from the values or beliefs of the author or reader.
o A literary work should be analyzed for its architecture (for example, rising and falling of the action; foreshadowing of event to come; use of language and metaphor).
Purpose of Criticism--sense-making, understanding, and pleasure in reading.
Elements of Literature [the vocabulary of criticism]
• Point of view - who is telling the story
o First-Person -- "I"; the narrator is usually a character (major or minor) in the story
o Omniscient -- the narrator knows the thoughts and actions of anyone in the story at any time and any place
o Limited (or third-person) -- told from the point of view of a single character but that character is not the narrator; "he", "she"
• Setting - time, geographical place, general environment and circumstance of the story.
o Some texts rely heavily on the setting to establish the feeling or environment (milieu) of places, especially places unfamiliar to the reader.
o Some texts can exist with a very minimal setting (folktales have minimal settings, allowing the story to be easily transported and adapted to other times and places).
• Characters
o Principal characters in a story are:
 the protagonist
 hero or heroine
 main character with whom the reader is expected to sympathizes
 the antagonist
 villain
 character who works against the protagonist
o Characters are expected to be properly motivated (have believable reasons for their actions)
o Types of characters:
1. Flat and Round Characters
 flat character - has only one or two readily identifiable traits and those traits do not change
 round character - has a more complex cluster of traits which develops or changes as the story develops
 round character can develop by the text providing new information about the character which causes the reader to see the character differently and in more depth
 round character can develop by events in the story changing the character and making him or her more complicated
2. Static and Dynamic Characters
 static character - remains essentially the same throughout the story and has no noticeable development [flat or round character]
 dynamic character - undergoes some important character transformation during the course of the story [always a round character]
o Foil Characters - possess personality traits opposite to those of another character, often the main character. Foil characters can set off, make more visible, traits of other characters.
o Character Development - the means the author uses to tell us about a character:
 the narrator
 other characters in the story telling/talking about them
 what the character says in dialogue
 the actions of the character
o Character Consistency - fictional characters behave in ways consistent with their nature as presented in the story.
Internationalism in Children's Literature
Three important aspects of internationalism in children's literature:
• Development of printed and visual materials in areas of the world which have until recently had a primarily oral literature and the development of opportunities for children to experience these materials, such as in libraries and cultural centers;
• Exchange of children¹s books from one country to another, either in original form or in translation; and
• The way different cultures are depicted and represented in the children's books of any given country.
Printed and visual materials infusing oral literature
Considerations
• Is there improvement in the extent of children's literature published in countries with an oral-based literature; and
• Has the quality and quantity of children's literature improved in countries with modest amounts of printed and visual literature for children.
Viewed globally, worldwide production of children¹s books is concentrated in North American European and Japanese literatures for children.
• For young children to whom books must be read aloud, there is little indigenous publishing in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia--outside of Japan.
• Brazil, India, Turkey, and Venezuela recently began improving the quantity, quality, and availability of books for young children. China even more recently has begun an effort to upgrade the quantity and quality of picture books.
• Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, and the Philippines have increased the primarily the quantity of books available in the middle and upper primary grades and a little of the quality.
• Mass-market materials in all areas of children's literature are imported primarily from Italy, Japan, Spain, and the United States. Many areas of the world must learn to read in non-native languages in order to borrow a written literature, especially for children. These materials do not meet the total reading needs of the cultures which borrow them.
Exchange of materials between countries
Indigenous literature of emerging markets have to only a very small degree penetrated and affected the children¹s literature of Europe, North America, and Japan.
• Between 1968 and 1981, only 12 direct translations or adaptations of children's books came to the United States from developing areas: 5 from Iran, 3 from Greece, 2 from Nigeria, and one each from Brazil and Puerto Rico.
• During this same time, seven authors from developing areas were not published in their home countries but had books appear directly in English: 3 from Vietnam, 2 from Jamaica, and one each from South Africa and Thailand.
European artist fled to the United States between and after the two World Wars. This group was a major force in the "internationalizing" of looks of U.S. children¹s books up to 1960. Immigration of European artists has been replaced with the immigration of artists from Asia and Latin America.
Fictional and factual representation [by U.S. Publications] of other cultures
It has been pointed out that American authors, when writing about other countries, tend to focus only on child characters from lower socioeconomic groups, whereas non-American authors describe a much wider range of characters.
In trying to establish the validity of fictional and folkloric materials, those following questions might be helpful:
• Was the material created by a participant of the culture or by an observe of it? Is this made clear in the introductory material?
• Has it been edited to remove all elements which are morally or socially not accepted in our society or have some of the intrinsic values of the society concerned been allowed to remain intact, e.g., polygamy, mater-of-fact acceptance of body functions, early marriage or love relationships?
• If it is historical, is this clearly indicated?
• If it is folkloric, is the source clearly identified?
In evaluating illustrations, photographs, or films, the following questions might be helpful:
• Is there obvious stereotyping, such as always depicting Chinese children with pigtails, Mexican children with barefoot and with burros, etc.?
• Are the facial characteristics of any race almost always the same, without regard for the fact that there are infinite varieties within all races?
• Is the comparative wealth or poverty of a nation or people illustrated with honesty or is it exaggerated?
• Is there over emphasis on rural or village live with no proportionate attention to urban life?
• Are the unusually different customs depicted more for their shock value than as illuminations of parts of the total structure of the culture?
In evaluating factual materials, the following questions might be helpful:
• What is the copyright date? Does this limit the usability of the work?
• If the copyright date is recent, do geographical and political facts truly reflect the latest changes?
• Whose point of view is represented--the insider or the outsider or both?
• What kinds of sources are given?
[Notes from an article by Ann Pellowski]
CHILDREN'S LITERATURE AND DIVERSITY
Some authors use "multicultural" and "cultural diversity" as the broader topic covering racial/ethnic diversity and social diversity. Other authors use "multicultural" and "cultural diversity" for racial and ethnic diversity and "social diversity" for other diversities.
Both the text and pictures of American children's literature over the years preserves a history of the biases, misunderstandings, fascinations, and melting-pot ethos of our dominant culture.
The study of this history of children's literature provides a way of increasing awareness of the ways biases, misunderstandings, and ethos creep into children¹s books to potentially reinforce problems which already exist in society.
Collections today should reflect the diversity of the communities they serve as well as the diversity of the cultures of the country and the world.
Books today should strive for accuracy and honesty in representing individuals and groups.