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.

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READER 1 – BLOCK 6

The Same but Different: Conservatism and Revolution in Children's Fiction

Peter Hunt

v Children's books, despite all the different titles and colourful packaging, are all rather similar.

v  The same sorts of things happen to the same sorts of people in the same sorts of situations and, especially, the endings are all much the same.

Ex:

-         Vulnerable character sets out on a quest with some supportive friends; adventures in strange place; returns home security. (Harry Potter)

-         Times are changing; adults are unreliable; comfortable past, uncertain future. (Tom's Midnight Garden)

-         The world is jungle; growing up; you become part of the life around you (The Other Side of Truth - The Tale of Peter Rabbit)

v Sameness and difference is the essence of children's books; they have many recurrent ideas.

v As Perry Nodelman: [some] themes are central issues in our conceptions of childhood and the process of maturing ... they combine what one wishes for with what one must accept, [and] deal with freedom and constriction, home and exile, escape and acceptance, and all create balances'.

v Stories for children usually have happy endings: things often hap­pen in safe spaces - idyllic rural settings or symbolic gardens, schools and families.

v  Quest and adventure stories are produced for boys, involving initiation, toughness, even sacrifice - and then a return to the safety of home.

v  Romances are produced for girls, involving families, finding identity, and, at extremes, finding partners or finding self-determination.

v  The characters are familiar: the 'feisty' girl who overcomes adult prejudices, the 'manly' boy who helps conquer the empire.

v In school stories, ini­tiation rituals and insider/outsider relationships; in a pony, class conflict and goodness rewarded, in 'other-world' fantasies there is a catalogue of wizards, monsters, strange companions, and desperate bat­tles.

v Different kinds of stories are popular at different times, and this tells us a lot about what a society thinks about childhood at any given moment.

COMPLETE IN THE FILE

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