#EA300A

 #Children's Literature

 #Lasley Jeffries

  The First Golden Age#

#Reader 1

#Block 3

#Week 10

#EA300A

 #Children's Literature

 #Joseph Bristow

  Empire Boys#

#Reader 1

#Block 2

#Week 7

This essay is not so important but it is good to read it and understand it as My Tutor said. But in MTA there was a question about the history of fairy tales so be careful please. Good luck.

The Summary

 

The Summary

#EA300A

 #Children's Literature

 # Jack Zipes

#Reader 1

#Block 1

#Week 3

This is essay is for reading but it is good to understand its main points. At my time it was only for reading and we didn't discuss it at any tutorials.  Good luck. 

 

The Summary

 

 

The Summary

#EA300A

 #Children's Literature

 #Humphery Carpenter

  The First Golden Age#

#Reader 1

#Block 1

#Week 1

This essay is not so important but it is good to read it and understand it. When I took this course it wasn't important and it was just for reading. Good luck. 

The Summary

 

The Summary

#EA300A

 #Children's Literature

 #Mathew Grenby

#Reader 1

#Block 1

#Week 1

 

Jacqueline Rose: P.3

- She argues that children's literature has nothing much to do with real children and their reading experience, but everything to do with how adults view childhood.

P.12
- The purposes of studying children's literature relates to cultural, educational, social and personal development.

- The role of adults in children's literature examined in terms of motivation and ideology.

 
P.13
Children's literature is an oxymoron?

 **Some for children, some about children.

**Instruction vs. delight

**Adult vs. child

((Is childhood innocent?))

Judy Blume:

No kid wants to stay a kid. The fantasy of childhood is to be an adult. Children are inexperienced, but they are not innocent. Childhood can be a terrible time of life. It is only adults who have forgotten who say "if only I could be a kid again".

P.14
**The relationship between children's book and childhood is far from simple.

**Fiction is fiction, and children's book say a great deal to adults about the relationships of adults to childhood, or about the concept of childhood at particular period, rather than portraying actual childhoods.

** Children's literature isabout power struggle. Adults write, children read. Adult are exercising power. Children's books are adopting some implicit attitudes.

Jacqueline Rose: 

 ((What is lurking behind the apparently innocent children's book is in fact something very intrusive, controlling, and often downright sinister.))

- Children's books are written by adults who have an agenda. Even those writers who claim to be nothing but entertainers have their own ideological stance, their own ideas of what is right and wrong, their own way of seeing the world.

 
P.15
**Children's books are not innocent or simple, involving ourselves with children's literature means involving ourselves in a complex, active literary social system.

**Dealing with children's literature involves responsibility, because what may at first sight seem like trivial or ephemeral texts are in fact immensely powerful.

P.19
**There are a crossover books between children and adults.
**Some books are in fact books aimed at two audiences.

P.20

-Most histories of children's literature suggest that children's book were initially entirely designed for educational purposes, with 'delight'.

-In the course of the nineteenth century, instruction gave way to entertainment, religion to fantasy – with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland seen as a kind of anarchic, liberating turning point.

P.23
Childhoods is generally defied either by physical and mental characteristics – size, development or immaturity, it has been commonly associated with lack of responsibility.

P.24
What we think of as a suitable for children is a part of complex social values.

_______________________________

نقاط مهمة في الاسبوع الاول ستدي قايد 

·          Hunt argues that Children Literature is deeply concerned with issues of power and politics, and that adults impose their own particular ideologies on children.

·         One of the reasons why certain books are considered unsuitable for children is that they challenge particular ideologies; especially that Childhood is an apolitical and asexual time of life that must be protected by adults.

·         All Children Literature is ideological and based on implicit or explicit attitudes, assumptions and world views.

·         Ideology is also closely related to ideas about power. The adult-child relationship is almost inevitably an unequal one, and in terms of literature, adults produce, write and buy books for children.

·         The question of whether literature should entertain or instruct is an ideological one, as is the question of what children should learn through literature.

Click

يَقتلُني حزنٌ ألّمَّ بعصفورٍ
ناحَ على شجرةٍ جرداءْ
يَلتمسُ الغُصن اليابسَ فيهتزُ
لا خضرةً فيهِ لا رَجاء
يَبكيهِ.. وَيبكي عُشَّه الماضي
يُعيده الزمنُ إلى الوَراءْ
كانت هُنا أرضاً من حبٍ
تَجرعَت حقداً أودعها الفناءْ
تَرتَجف جناحاته وكأنما ترفضُ
الذكرى وترفضُ البقاءْ
أيا طيراً له قلباً رقيقاً
وأحلاماً.. عاشقُ للفضاء
شُعاعُ الشمسِ لا يأْفلْ
وذواتُ الحجرِ منبعاً للماءْ
وغداً تعود الحياةُ إن لم تكن
هنا.. فعلى سحبِ السماءْ

#Lolita Pen 

Book 3 Part 3 

Preparing for A150 before the course starts: historical evidence

One of the most important aspects of studying history is the need to respect the evidence of the past. We cannot know the past directly because we cannot experience it in person, but we can use the remnants of the past – archaeological remains, the relics of material culture, written documents and, for more recent periods, film, TV and electronic media – as evidence for the events, developments and beliefs of the past. To use this material we need to come to it with open but informed minds. We have questions we want to ask of it, but we cannot require that it prove a case. We also need to understand the circumstances that created it and the preconceptions of its creators.

One of the most important aspects of studying history is the need to respect the evidence of the past. We cannot know the past directly because we cannot experience it in person, but we can use the remnants of the past – archaeological remains, the relics of material culture, written documents and, for more recent periods, film, TV and electronic media – as evidence for the events, developments and beliefs of the past. To use this material we need to come to it with open but informed minds. We have questions we want to ask of it, but we cannot require that it prove a case. We also need to understand the circumstances that created it and the preconceptions of its creators.


[In approaching a historical source one might start] by answering the following questions:

1. Who wrote it?
2. Who was the intended audience?
3. When was it written?
   
   Now consider:
   
4. what type of document is it (public, private, official, published, etc.)?
5. What was its historical context?
6. What comments can you make on specific points in the text?

 #A150
#BOOK3

#Prepare Your Self

#History
# History Evidence
#Open University
   

Preparing for A150 before the course starts: what history is

From Book 1, Reputations, Chapter 5 Stalin, p. 126.

Activity

Look up the terms ‘history’ and ‘myth’ in a dictionary, and then take some time to reflect on the differences between them.

Discussion

I expect that most answers to this activity will point out that, in relation to the past, a myth is a distorted account of events, whereas a historical account is more ‘truthful’. This is not inaccurate, but the issue is slightly more complicated than this. 

I looked up ‘myth’ in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). At first sight it didn’t seem that the definition helped very much: ‘A purely fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural person, actions, or events, and embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical phenomena.’

Obviously we can’t use a definition of myth that emphasises the purely fictional, but we can work to some extent with a definition that stresses a ‘popular idea concerning ... historical phenomena’. We need also to revisit the ‘fictional’ aspect of the OED’s definition, because our definition should look something like ‘a popular idea concerning historical phenomena, which distorts the reality of past events, or cannot be fitted with the weight of the available evidence’.

When I looked up ‘history’ I found a large number of possible definitions and a multitude of examples of their use. There seemed to me to be two definitions given by the OED which are relevant to us: ‘A written narrative constituting a continuous methodical record, in order of time, of important or public events, esp. those connected with a particular country, people, individual etc’; and ‘That branch of knowledge which deals with past events, as recorded in writings or otherwise ascertained; the formal record of the past, esp. of human affairs or actions; the study or formation and growth of communities and nations.’

The question of what history is, of course, is a complex one, and there are many definitions and much academic dispute over them. All we need here is a provisional working definition. ‘A written narrative constituting a continuous methodical record’,as the OED puts it, is often the end result of historical investigation. In order to answer what history is, we need to combine our sense of the end product with the description of history as a field of knowledge contained in the second definition. Let’s define history as an account of past events based upon the interpretation of all the available evidence that relates to the particular aspect of the past it is studying.

The key, therefore, to grasping the difference between myth and history is that where myth is a distortion and cannot be fitted with the weight of the available evidence, history is an account that aims at capturing the truth about the past through a careful interpretation of evidence. It is worth noting that the issue is slightly more complex, for myths about the past play important roles in shaping the actions of historical actors. Historical accounts of the past are often constructed as replies to mythical accounts. Therefore, even though they are distinct, in practice the two are locked in continuous dialogue with each other.

I’d like you to put to one side any notes you have made on this activity for now. We will revisit and expand upon some of these themes later in the chapter.

 #A150
#BOOK3

#Prepare Your Self

#History
#Open University
   

Book 3 Part 2 

 

Preparing for A150 before the course starts: historical sources

From Book 3 Cultural Encounters, Chapter 1 The art of Benin: changing relations between Europe and Africa I, pp. 16-20.

1.2 The Conquest of Benin in the 1890s

In 1897 Benin was conquered by the British. This was not only a traumatic break in the history of Benin, which brought to a sudden end the independence of the centuries-old kingdom; it was also a key ‘cultural encounter’ in the discovery of Benin art by Europeans. This section will examine the occupation and why it happened. It will also focus on how we know about the occupation. Earlier in the course you have looked at the nature of evidence about the past and about how it has been used by historians. The occupation of Benin raises interesting questions about the relationship between the two: how the evidence available shapes how history is written [...]

We have, therefore, no shortage of first-hand reports on the events surrounding the British conquest of Benin. As I hope you will have spotted, however, all the sources listed were written by British participants. Benin was an oral society and there are no accounts written at the time by the people of Benin. Nor is this simply a story of two sides. The British expeditions used large numbers of African carriers, and most of the soldiers involved in the conquest of Benin were also African. The written accounts all come from a small and quite atypical group of witnesses.

However, the written accounts were not the only way that the events were remembered. As in many oral societies, oral records were important in Benin society: ‘the recounting of history has been a highly valued form of intellectual activity [...] The transmission of oral tradition in Benin is done through story-telling’ (Layiwola, 2007, p. 84). A first written history of Benin based on such sources was published as early as 1934 (Egharevba, 1960 [1934]). Oral narratives, many of them relating to the royal house, and often supported by mnemonic devices – songs, proverbs, or visual artefacts which prompt memories and act as reference points – are an important source of information about Benin’s past. The events of 1897 were also integrated into oral narratives, which are widely remembered in Benin to this day.

Such narratives, however, work in a different way from historical documents. Whereas a written source preserves the words used at the time, so that the problem for the historian is to understand the document in its contemporary context, in memories and oral traditions ‘the past provides a subject in which the present continually interacts in order to produce a new consciousness’ (Layiwola, 2007,
p. 83). Oral tradition does not preserve the sources in an independent form. Instead, it provides a continually developing interpretation which helps explain past events.

It would be easy to see this distinction as the same as that between history and myth which you encountered when exploring Stalin’s reputation earlier in the course. Myth, you will recall, was defined as a ‘popular idea concerning historical phenomena’, whereas history is ‘an account of past events based upon the interpretation of all the available evidence’ (see the introduction to Chapter 5 in Book 1). In fact, oral tradition has made a major contribution to African history. Later in this section we will look at one example of how it has contributed to our understanding of the conquest of Benin. The section, however, focuses on a different issue. What happens if ‘all the available evidence’ from the period was written by one party? Does the fact that all the documentary accounts of the conquest of Benin come from British records mean that any history based on them will be irretrievably biased? Can historians write ‘history’ when the evidence is tainted in this way?

 #A150
#BOOK3

#Prepare Your Self

#History
# History Sources
#Open University
   

Book 1 Part 4 

Preparing for A150 before the course starts: The Island

From Book 3, Cultural Encounters, Chapter 6 Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes, Resources, pp.221-2.

 

A Greek tragedy for our times

A sister defies the law to bury an outlawed brother denied burial by official decree. The king sees no humanity in her act, only betrayal. The chorus, society, looks on, compromised by the need to comply with a ruler intent on revenge.

Sounds familiar? Sounds contemporary? Of course it does: by such ruthlessness is power maintained. Or is it? The story is not a new one. The Greek tragedian Sophocles of Athens, who lived in the fifth century BC, wrote Antigone, the first of his Theban plays, as a study of conflict. Antigone mourns her dead brother and breaks the law. King Creon exceeds the dictates of power, a dangerous overreaching. His son, Haemon, instead of marrying Antigone, must reject his father; he chooses to die with his bride-to-be.

It is a chilling tale and a timeless one. Antigone’s dilemma is a fundamental issue of honour. The play remains a foundation text of European theatre. Brecht was drawn to it. As was Anouilh. The French playwright revisited the play for his version, which was performed in 1942 during the German occupation. Initially reacting to the drama as theatre, audiences were to slowly grasp that Creon, a plausible enough characterisation, personified Vichy compromise, while Antigone was none other than France at its most idealistic. The politics of Antigone would never be lost on an artist as politically alert as Seamus Heaney, the Nobel laureate in literature.

An autobiographical but never confessional writer, Heaney the poet – who has always remained a teacher in the most honourable and generous sense of the word – is at once direct and complex; his response to the political remains shrewdly subtle.

‘I taught Antigone to college students in a Belfast teacher-training college in 1963. I talked about it in relation to Aristotle and Greek tragedy. Five years later, in October 1968, I read Conor Cruise O’Brien in the Listener using Antigone to illuminate the conflict in Northern Ireland – the conflict that is within individuals as well as within the society. Antigone and her sister, Ismene, represent two opposing impulses that often co-exist: the impulse to protect and rebel and the impulse to conform for the sake of a quiet life. From that moment on Antigone was more than a piece of the academic syllabus: it was a lens that helped to inspect reality more clearly.’

[...]

Antigone is a play that has endured, while Antigone as a character continues to impress and inspire as a heroine of conscience as well as courage. And it is that conscience, even more than the courage, that has inspired other writers to observe her, and the play, again and again. [...]

Source: Eileen Battersby (2004) ‘A Greek tragedy for our times’, The Irish Times, 3 April (City Edition; Weekend), p. 55. 

 ___________________________________________________________________

From Book 3, Cultural Encounters, Chapter 6 Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes, Resources, p.241.

Beginning to hope

Our amateur drama society made its yearly offering at Christmas. My thespian career, which had lain dormant since I played John Wilkes Booth while at Fort Hare, had a modest revival on Robben Island. Our productions were what might now be called minimalist: no stage, no scenery, no costumes. All we had was the text of the play.

I performed in only a few dramas, but I had one memorable role: that of Creon, the king of Thebes, in Sophocles’ Antigone. I had read some of the classic Greek plays in prison, and found them enormously elevating. What I took out of them was that character was measured by facing up to difficult situations and that a hero was a man who would not break down even under the most trying circumstances.

When Antigone was chosen as the play I volunteered my services, and was asked to play Creon, an elderly king fighting a civil war over the throne of his beloved city-state. At the outset, Creon is sincere and patriotic, and there is wisdom in his early speeches when he suggests that experience is the foundation of leadership and that obligations to the people take precedence over loyalty to an individual.

Of course you cannot know a man completely, his character, his principles, sense of judgement, not till he’s shown his colours, ruling the people, making laws. Experience, there’s the test.

But Creon deals with his enemies mercilessly. He has decreed that the body of Polynices, Antigone’s brother, who had rebelled against the city, does not deserve a proper burial. Antigone rebels, on the grounds that there is a higher law than that of the state. Creon will not listen to Antigone, neither does he listen to anyone but his own inner demons. His inflexibility and blindness ill become a leader, for a leader must temper justice with mercy. It was Antigone who symbolized our struggle; she was, in her own way, a freedom fighter, for she defied the law on the ground that it was unjust.

Source: Nelson Mandela (1994) Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, London, Abacus, pp. 540–1.

 #A150
#The Island

#Prepare Your Self

#Antigone
#Greek Mythology