William Moebius
Department of Comparative Literature
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Aspects of Children's Literature
Comparative Literature

Fall, 1992
Mondays-4:00 P.M. to 6:30 P.M.

Schedule of Meetings

Sept. 14 Defining children's literature: nursery rhyme, nonsense, a reading experience...

Sept. 21 Presented world and presentational process: reading picturebooks

Sept. 28 Tradition and economics: folktale and modern tale

Oct. 5 Adaptations or conversions of "high" literature

Oct. 14 Critical establishments and canonics

Oct. 19 Reader response and pedagogics

Oct. 26 Time for play?

Nov. 2 Consumption and elimination and their domains

Nov. 16 The eternal child/ the disappearance of childhood

Nov. 23 Feminine paradigms in picturebook and verbal narrative

Nov. 30 The role of the animal in picturebook and extended narratives

Dec. 7 The comic book

Dec. 14 Development theories and notions of identity: defining the healthy child/reader/interpreter

Wednesday, October 14, is an exception.

"Expectations"

Please complete assigned readings in a timely fashion.

You are expectied to participate in class discussion. Some show-and-tell is welcome and inevitable.

You will be responsible for three 20 minute seminar presentations during the semester. One of these must be written up. Presenters should have an outline of the presentation ready to distribute when class begins.

A final paper, 20 pp. or more in length, double-spaced related to issues raised in class, and grounded in the close reading of one or more texts for children, will be due of the first day of final exams in December.

It is important that everyone, specialist and non-specialist alike, make a substantial to expand his or her reading repertoire in literature for children. Towards this end, a list of "Top Ten Discoveries" should be submitted at three week intervals during the semester (four lists in all). These lists should contain proper bibliographical information and a brief commentary. Within the four lists (a "top forty"), you should include your reading or rereading of one novel from an earlier (pre 1900) tradition of children's literature, at least five children's books written originally in a language other than English, and at least five others that depict the cultural experience of minorities here or abroad.

Readings (expect a few changes)

Sept. 14 Defining children's literature: nursery rhyme, nonsense, a reading experience...

Sept. 21 Presented world and presentational process: reading picturebooks

Ciaran Benson, "Art and- language in middle childhood: a question of translation", Word & Image, 123-140.

Peter Hunt, "Criticism and the Picture Book" in Criticism Theory, & Children's Literature, 175-188.

Wm. Moebius, "Introduction to picturebook codes," Word & Image 2:2, 141-158.

--------------------, - "Room with a View: Bedroom Scenes in Picturebooks," CL 19, 53-74.

Joseph H. and Chava Schwarcz, "A Close Look at a Picture Book," "Longing for Love, Contending for Love," in The Picture Book Comes of Age, 14-19, 62-83.

Sept. 28 Tradition and economics: folktale and modern tale Elizabeth Cook, "Cinderella's sisters get ready for a ball," in The Ordinary and the Fabulous, CUP, 1969, 102-113.

Margaret Meek, "What Counts as Evidence in Theories of Children's Literature?" TIP XXI:4, 284-292.

Jacqueline Rose, "Peter Pan and Commercialisation of the the Children: children are a good sell," in The Case of Peter Pan or ..., 87-114.

Roger Sale, "Fairy Tales," "Written Tales: Perrault to Andersen" in Fairy Tales and After, 23-47, 49-75.

Catherine Storr, "Why Folk Tales and Fairy Stories live Forever," in Nicholas Tucker, ed., Suitable for Children? 64-73.

Oct. 5 Adaptations or conversions of "high" literature

Aidan Chambers, "The Reader in the Book," in Nancy Chambers, ed., The Signal Approach to Children's Literature (1981), 250-275.

Wm. Colding, "The author as fabulist: the nature of `overt significance'" in The Cool Web, 226-240.

Myles McDowell, "Fiction for Children and Adults: Some Essential Differences" in Fox, et al., ed., Writers, Critics and Children, 140-156.

Zohar Shavit, "The Self-Image of Children's Literature", in Poetics of Children's Literature, 33-59.

Jill Paton Walsh, "The Rainbow Surface," in Suitable for Children?, 212-215.

Oct. 14 Critical establishments and canonics

Eleanor Cameron, "McLuhan, Youth and Literature" in Heins, ed., Crosscurrents of Criticism, 98-120.

Ariel Dorfman, "Of Elephants and Ducks" in The Empire's Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to our Minds, 17-64.

Dr. J Langfeldt, "The Educational and Moral Values of Folk and Fairy Tales" in Suitable for Children?,  56-63.

Wm. Moebius, "Cultural Entitlement in the New Age", in The Lion and the Unicorn, 16, 1992, 57-65.

Jerry Morgan and Manfred B. Sellner, excerpt from "Discourse and Linguistic Theory" in Theoretical Issues in Reading Comprehension, 1980, 190-193.

David Rees, "Dahl's Chickens: Roald Dahl" in CL in Ed, 19:3, 143-155.

Patrick Richardson, "Miss Potter and the Little Rubbish," and "Teach your Baby to Rule", in Suitable for Children?, 173-183.

Catherine Storr, "Things that go bump in the night," in Suitable for Children?, 143-152.

Excerpts from Mrs. Trimmer, The Guardian of Education, in Suitable for Children?, 37-41.

Oct. 19 Reader response and pedagogics

André Favat, from Child and Tale: The Origins of  Interest.

D. W. Harding, "Response to Literature: Dartmouth  seminar report", The Cool Web, 379-392.

Peter Hunt, "The Text and the Reader" in Criticism, Theory, & Children's Literature, 81-99.

Alice Miller, from "Poisonous Pedagogy" in For Your Own Good (1983, 1984), 3-63, 92-102.

Jacqueline Rose, "Rousseau and Alan Garner: Innocence of the child and of the word," in The Case of Peter Pan or..., 42-65.

Louise Rosenblatt, from Literature and Exploration.

Jon C. Stott, "The Spiralled Sequence Story Curriculum: A Structuralist Approach to Teaching Fiction in the Elementary Grades", CL in Ed 18:3, 148-162.

Nicholas Tucker;, "How Children Respond to Fiction," in Writers, Critics and Children, 177-188.

Oct. 26 Time for play?

Noelle Batt, "Complexity and Complexification," tr. Wm. Moebius, (orig. "Complexité et Complexification" in La revue des livres pour enfants, No. 115-116, Automne 1987, 71-81).

James Britton, "The third area where we are more our-selves," in The Cool Web, 40-47.

Jacqueline Rose, "Peter Pan and Freud: who is talking and to whom?"; in The Case of Peter Pan or..., 12-41.

D.W. Winnicott, "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena;" "Playing: A Theoretical Statement" in Playing and Reality, 1-25, 38-52.

Martha Wolfenstein, "Sex, Names and Double Meanings" in Children's Humor: A Psychological Analysis, 63-91.

Nov. 2 Consumption and elimination and their domains

Marie-France Doray, tr. by Margaret R. Higonnet, "Cleaniness and Class in the Countess of Ségur's novels", CL 17, 64-80.

Louis Marin, "Little Butterpot, or the Spell of the Voice "Little Red Riding Hood")"; "Robert Sauce ("Sleeping Beauty in the Forest")"; "Butcher's Meat and Game, or the Culinary Sign within Generalized Education ("Tom Thumb")", in Food for Thought, 39-43, 133-147, 175-186.

Paulo Medeiros, "Devouring the Text: the Subversive Image in Jules Ratte" CL 19, 31-52.

Jean Perrot, "Maurice Sendak's Ritual Cooking of the Child in Three Tableaux: the Moon, Mother, and Music," CL 18, 68-86.

Maurice Sendak, interview, "The Artist as Author: The strength of the double vision", in The Cool Web, 241- 256.

Nov. 16 The eternal child/ the disappearance of childhood

Rachel Fuchs, from "Attitudes and Public Policy Toward the Family" in Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France (1984), 49-61.

William Moebius, "L'Enfant Terrible Comes of Age", Notebooks in Cultural Analysis, I)I, 32-50.

Judith Plotz, "The Disappearance of Childhood: Parent-Child Role Reversals in After the First Death and A Solitary Blue", CL in Ed 19:2, 67-79.

Neil Postman, "The Incunabula of Childhood," in The Disappearance of Childhood, 37-51.

C. John Sommerville, "The Glorification of the Child;" "The Business of Entertaining Children" in The Rise and Fall of Childhood, 120-135, 136-147.

Marie Winn, "The End of Secrecy;" "The End of Play" in Children Without Childhood, 59-74, 75-83.

Nov. 23 Feminine paradigms in picturebook and verbal narrative

Ruth Bottigheimer, "Paradigms for Powerlessness," in Grimms' Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales, 71-80.

Beverly Lym Clark, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Little Woman", in CL 17, 81-97.

Angela M. Estes and Kathleen Margaret Lant, "Dismembering the Text: the Horror of Louisa May Alcott's  Little Women," CL 17, 98-123.

Laura Laffrado, "If We Have Any Little Girls Among Our Readers: Gender and Education in Hawthorne's "Queen Christina", CL 17, 124-134.

Max Luthi, "The Fairy Tale Hero: the Image of Man in the Fairy Tale", in Once Upon a Time..., 135-146.

Lissa Paul, "Enigma Variations: What Feminist Theory Knows About Children's Literature," Hunt, ed. Children's Literature: the Development of Criticism, 148-165.

Nov. 30 The role of the animal in picturebook and verbal narrative

Arthur Arnold, "The Pig--- Pet, Pork or Sacrifice," CL in Ed 19:2, 80-85.

Edmund Leach, "Babar's civilisation analyzed," in Only Connect, 176-182.

Wm. H. Magee, "The animal story: a challenge in technique," in Only Connect, 221-232.

Anne Royall Newman, "Images of the Bear in Children's Literature," CL in Ed 18:3, 132-138.

Roger Sale, "Animals,' in Fairy Tales and After..., 77- 99.

Dec. 7 The comic book

Peter Dickinson, "A Defense of Rubbish," in Writers, Critics and Children, 73-76.

Dorfman and Mattelart, "From the child to the noble savage;" "From the Noble Savage to the Third World," in How to Read Donald Duck, 41-47, 48-60.

Mordecai Richler, "The Great Comic Book Heroes" in The Cool Web, 299-308.

Umberto Eco, "The Myth of Superman," in The Role of the Reader, 107-124.

Dec. 14 Development theories and notions of identity: defining the healthy child/reader/interpreter

Mary Burgan, "The Question of Work: Adolescent Literature and the Eriksonian Paradigm," CL in Ed, 19:4, 187- 198.

Steven V. Daniels, "The Velveteen Rabbit: a Kleinian Perspective", CL 18, 17-29.

Derek Eales, "Enid Blyton, Judy Blume and Cultural Impossibilities," CL in Ed 20:2, 81-89.

Jerry Phillips and Ian Wojcik-Andrews, "Notes toward a Marxist Critical Practice," CL 18, 127-130.

D.W. Winnicott, "The Concept of a Healthy Individual" in Home is Where We start From (1986); 21-34.

Virginia L. Wolf, "From the Myth to the Wake of Home: Literary Houses," CL 18, 53-67.

Selected Theory and Criticism

Applebee, Arthur N. The Child's Concept of Story, Two to Seventeen. 1978.

Arbuthnot, May Hill. Children and Books. 1957.

Avery, Gillian. Childhood's Pattern: A Study of the heroes and heroines of children's fiction, 1770-1950. 1975.

Bader, Barbara. American Picture Books: from Noah's Ark to the Beast Within. 1976.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. 1974.

Bator, Robert. Signposts to Criticism of Children's Literature. 1983.

Batt, Noelle. "Some analytical and evaluative tools for children's literature: Complexity and Complexification", tr. by Wm.  Moebius, orig. in La revue des livres pour enfants, no. 115-116, automne 1987,71-81.

Berry, Eric and Best, Herbert. Writing for Children. 1947, 1964.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. 1975.

Blishen, Edward, ed. The Thorny Paradise. 1975.

Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Grimms' Bad Girls & Bold Boys: the Moral and Social Vision of the Tales. 1987.

Butler, Francelia. Sharing Literature with Children. 1977.

Chambers, Nancy, ed. The Signal Approach to Children's Literature. 1981.

Cameron, Eleanor. The Green and Burning Tree. 1969.

Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. 1978.

Chukovsky, Kornei. From Two to Five. 1963.

Cook, Elisabeth. The Ordinary and the Fabulous. 1969.

Dorfman, Ariel. The Empire's Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds, C. Hansen, tr. 1983.

-------,-------and Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck. 1971.

Dundes, Alan. The Study of Folklore. 1965.

Egoff, Sheila; Stubbs, G.T.; Ashley, L.F. Only Connect: Readings in Children's Literature. 1969.

Ellis, Alex. How to Find Out About Children's Literature. 3rd ed., 1973.

Favat, Andre. Child and Tale: The Origins of Interest. 1977.

Fenwick, Sara Innis, ed. A Critical Approach to Children's  Literature. 1967.

Fisher, Margery. Classics for children and young people. 1986.

Fox, Geoff, et al. Writers, Critics and Children. 1976, 1978.

Ginsburg, M. and Opper, S. Piaget's Theory of Intellectual  Development: An Introduction. Rev. ed. 1979.

Haviland, Virginia. Children and Literature. 1973.

Heins, Paul, ed. Crosscurrents of Criticism: Horn Book Essays 1968-1977. 1977.

Hunt, Peter. Children's Literature: the Development of Criticism.1990.

--------,----------. Criticism, Theory, & Children's Literature. 1991.

Huck, Charlotte S. Children's Literature in the Elementary School. 3rd Ed. 1976.

Hurlimann, Bettina. Three Centuries of Children's Books in Europe  1967.

Jan, Isabelle. On Children's Literature. 1973.

Kennan, Hugh T., ed. "Narrative Theory and Children's Literature" in Studies in the Literary Imagination, 18, Fall 1985.

Lanes, Selma G. Down the Rabbit Hole. 1971.

-----,--------. The Art of Maurice Sendak. 1984.

Leeson, Robert. Children's Books and Class Society, Past and Present. 1977.

Lukens, Rebecca J. A Critical Handbook of Children's Literature. 1976, 1982, 1986.

Luthi, Max. The European Folk Tale: Form and Nature. 1982.

--------, ---. Once Upon a Time: On the Nature of Fairy Tales. 1976.

--------, ---. The Fairytale as Art Form and Portrait of Man. 1988.

Marin, Louis. Food for Thought, tr. by Mette Hjort. 1989. Orig. La parole mangée et autres essais théologico-politiques. 1986.

Matthews, Gareth B. Philosophy and the Young Child. 1980.

--------,-------- Dialogues with Children. 1984.

Meek, Warlow and Barton, ed. The Cool Web: The Pattern of Children's Reading. 1977.

Meyer, Susan E. A Treasury of the Great Children's Book Illustrators. 1983.

Miller, Alice. The Drama of the Gifted Child. Tr. by Ruth Ward. 1981.

------,------. For Your Own Good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence. Tr. by Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum. 1983, 1984.

------,------. Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society 's Betrayal of the Child. Tr. by Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum. 1984.

Moebius, Wm. "L'enfant terrible comes of age" in Notebooks in Cultural Analysis, 2, 1985, 32-50.

-------, --. "Introduction to Picturebook Codes," in Word & Images 2:2, April-June, 1986, 141-158.

-------, --. "Room with a View: Bedroom Scenes in Picturebooks", in CL 19, 1991, 53-76.

------,------. "Cultural Entitlement in the New Age," in The Lion and the Unicorn 16, 1992, 57-65.

Nodelman, Perry. "Text as Teacher: the Beginning of Charlotte's Web" in CL 13, 1985, 109-127.

Opie, Iona and Peter. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book. 1966, 1967.

------,--------,-------- . The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhyme.  1951.

Perrot, Jean. Du Jeu, des enfants et des livres. 1987.

------, ----. Art Baroque, Art d'Enfance. 1991.

Philip, Neil. The Cinderella Story: The Origins and Variations of the Story Known as Cinderella. 1989.

Piaget, Jean. The Child's Conception of the World. 1929.

------, ----. Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. 1962.

------, ----. Psychology of the Child. 1969.

Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood. 1982.

Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. 1956.

Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction. 1984.

Rudman, Masha. Children's Literature: An Issues Approach. Rev. ed. : 1989?.

Rustin, Margaret and Michael. Narratives of Love and Loss: Studies in Modern Children's Fiction. 1988.

Sale, Roger. Fairy Tales and After. 1979.

Scherf, Walter. Lexikon der Zaubermarchen. 1982.

Schwarcz, Joseph H. and Chava Schwarcz. The Picturebook Comes of Age 1991.

Sendak, Maurice. Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books & Pictures. 1988.

Shavit, Zohar. Poetics of Children's Literature. 1986.

Singer, Dorothy G. and Tracey A. Revenson. A Piaget Primer: How a Child Thinks. 1978.

Smith, James Steel. A Critical Approach to Children's Literature. 1967.

Soriano, Marc. Les Contes de Perrault: Culture savante et traditions populaires. 1968.

Sutherland, Zena. The Best in Children's Books: Guide to Children's Literature, 1966-1972. 1973.

Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales. 1988.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic. 1973.

Townsend, John Rowe. Written for Children (2nd ed.) 1965, 1974.

--------,----------. A Sense of Story. 1971.

Tucker, Nicholas. Suitable for Children? Controversies in Children's Literature. 1976.

------, --------. The Child and the Book: a Psychological and Literary Exploration. 1983.

Winn, Marie. Children Without Childhood. 1981, 1983.

Winnicott, D.W. Playing & Reality. 1971.

Wolfenstein, Martha. Children's Humor: A Psychological Analysis. 1954.

Zipes, Jack. The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood. 1983.

-----,----. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. 1983.