Politics

Reading a book is commonly described with a spatial metaphor as a journey into the unknown. According to cognitive narratology, a fictional storyworld’s invitation for the mental mapping of imaginary locations holds pedagogical potentials. It allows for a geographically contextualized, enworlded, embodied enactment of “what if” scenarios; it makes us wonder what it feels like to experience elsewhere, to put ourselves in someone else’s place, to empathically seek meeting points surpassing differences. Children’s literature often plays with the fantastification of space: enchanted woods, crystal palaces and goblin mines are familiar from fairy tales, while iconic locations in canonical children’s classics like Wonderland, Neverland, the Land of Oz, the Hundred Acre Wood, Narnia, Terabithia or Hogwarts mythify special spaces of childhood conceived as worlds apart from adult reality. Many contemporary children’s books defamiliarize ordinary places as extraordinary to explore difficult itineraries of unhomely homes, nomadic subjectivities, migration routes, warzones, desirelines, and transgressive bordercrossing intents, which strategically initiate self-reflective re-locations whereby child readers can learn to know their place beyond “aetonormative” (Nikolajeva) topographies prescribed by grown-ups. 

Our workshop examines the spatial politics of children’s literature in a selection of classic and contemporary texts. We aim to inspect if the romanticization/ exoticization of children’s spheres inevitably reinforces the marginalization/segregation of minorities, or on the contrary the conception of children’s otherworlds grants visibility to the unique “psychogeographic experiences” (Debord) of the “mighty child” (Beauvais) while celebrating the empowering gift of infantile spatial imagination. Focusing on the political critical potential of the literary texts we ask how/if they can represent space as an ideologically shaped, affectively charged “cultural construction produced by social agency” (Lefèbvre) that is dynamically shaped by fantasies and factualities, but can also function as a possible playground for ludic revisions? These stories may lend themselves to ecocritical readings of green spaces, necropolitical interpretations of heterotopias, queer understandings of tropes of safe places or coming out, or even posthumanist analysis of no man’s land or the wilderness, among others. However, on adopting these theoretically-informed critical lenses aren’t we silencing children’s real lived experiences by deforming them into adult metaphors of spatiality? Should we rather ask how narratological strategies, iconotextual dynamics, hybrid genres (as museumbooks, cookbooks, mapbooks, crossover texts) and transmedia storytelling practices can hone young readers’ interpretive skills, teach them how to navigate difficult textual labyrinths to decode meanings critically (a skill particularly precious in our post-truth era of fake news) and to eventually venture beyond the pages of the book into the extradiegetic universe where they can safely and self-assuredly experience a spatial agency that is the token of an informed activist citizenship.

Required Reading 

Neil Gaiman. Coraline. Bloomsbury, 2002.

Lewis Carroll. “Chapter 1: Down the Rabbit Hole.” Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. MacMillan, 1865. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-h/11-h.htm#chap01

Frank L Baum. “Chapter 11: The Wonderful City of Oz.” The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. 1900. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/55/pg55-images.html#chap11

Anthony Brown. Tunnel. Walker Books, 2008.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Places.” Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf

Preparatory Tasks for all Students

1. Select a memorable fictional place/space from your own country’s children’s literature/ culture, think about its national specificities and potential global appeal. (Bring a copy of the book if relevant, you can share illustrations if you’d like.) Compare it with the spatial poetics/ politics of the readings assigned for class.

2. Try to recall what was your favourite place when you were a child. Explain why you felt this location really belonged to you. Has your experience of this real-life place been affected by your readings and your familiarity with fictional realms? How does your adult understanding

(nostalgic recollections/ traumatic distortions/ cultured overinterpretations) of this site differ from your childhood experiences? Can this spot be interpreted as a heterotopia? Do your individual recollections resemble in any way Coraline’s childish perception of spatiality as depicted in Gaiman’s novel?

3. Map the popular cultural afterlife of canonical children’s literary places. “Down the rabbit hole” and “over the rainbow” have been turned into set-phrases, recycled as memes, used for political propaganda, and entertainment purposes commodifying fantasy, but also employed for subversive social critical ends and self-ironic postmodern pastiche. Can you mention a few examples?

Additional Tasks for Students taking credits

Read Michel Foucault’s article “Of Other Places” and write an essay of 500-700 words about a place or space than can be interpreted as a heterotopia in a piece of children’s literature of your choice. Submit your assignment as a Word document to akerchy@gmail.com no later than 20 July 2024. Please use the subject heading “CL Summer School: Spatial Politics.”

Further recommended readings

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. (1958) Penguin, 2014.

Cecire, Maria Sacheko et al eds. „Introduction. Spaces of Power, Places of Play.” Space and Place in Children’s Literature 1789 to the Present. Routledge, 2016. https://www.book2look.com/embed/9781317052029

Doughty, Terry and Dawn Thomson, eds. Knowing their Place. Identity and Space in Children’s Literature. Cambridge Scholars, 2011.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

Sundmark, Björn and Chrysogonus Siddha Maliland. “Children’s Literary Geography.” The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature and Culture. Eds. Claudia Nelson; Elisabeth Wesseling; Andrea Mei-Ying Wu, Routledge, 2023. 45-57.

Tally, Robert T. Spatiality. New Critical Idiom. New York, 2013.

Yi-Fu Tuan. Topophilia. A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Prenticehall, 1974.

Initially a diagnosis for severe homesickness, nostalgia began as a longing for place (home), became a longing for time (childhood), and has become a longing for pasts (real and imagined). It’s an illness, a mood, a political strategy, and a marketing opportunity. Nostalgia might seem directed towards a past, but it’s also a response to the present and a way of imagining the future.  

In this seminar, we’ll examine some facets of this complex social phenomenon. 

Required reading

Critical readings 

Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and Its Discontents,” The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2007: https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-uses-of-the-past/articles/nostalgia-and-its-discontents 

Louise Joy, “Affect” from Keywords for Children’s Literature, 2nd Edition, ed. Nel, Paul, and Christensen (2021) 

Elisabeth Wesseling, introduction to Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia: Books, Toys, and Contemporary Media Culture (2018) 

Boel Westin, “Nostalgia” from Keywords for Children’s Literature, 2nd Edition, ed. Nel, Paul, and Christensen (2021) 

Literary/cultural readings

Excerpts from Mark Nixon, Much Loved (2013) 

Sophie Blackall, Farmhouse (2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXNCYGXf29Q&list=PLXbi7c072AFWYwl0tNCXRIKeGazt7tXW0 

Tasha Tudor, A Time to Keep (1977) 

Andrea Wang and Jason Chin, Watercress (2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJhbHPc5kJ4 

Jacqueline Woodson and Leo Espinosa, The World Belonged to Us (2022): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk1RBhS3ntY&list=PLXbi7c072AFWYwl0tNCXRIKeGazt7tXW0 

Preparatory task for all participants 

1. A personal question, by way of introducing ourselves to each other.

    A: What’s something from your childhood that makes you nostalgic?

    B: Which emotions does it inspire? Identify at least two emotions.

    If it’s a physical object that you can photograph or bring to Antwerp, please do. If it’s a memory, a feeling, or something not physical, then you can of course just describe it.

2. Since we all come from different places, this question addresses the culture in which you grew up. Identify one children’s book, film, TV show, toy, or other artefact that — in its themes, narrative, or marketing — appeals to nostalgia.

    A. How would you characterize its nostalgia? What does it long for?

    B. Do any of the critical readings help you describe it? (In Boym’s terms, is it more restorative or more reflective? Or perhaps it’s Romantic? Or something else entirely?)

    C. What is a word for nostalgia in your native language? Does that word help characterize it? I ask not just because language shapes understanding, but because different terms offer     different shades of meaning. In Portuguese, Saudade describes a feeling of melancholic longing for an absent something or someone — including one you’ve never actually seen. In Turkish,     Hüzün conveys the sense of (to quote Maria Stepanova) “what has already passed and yet still suffuses our daily lives with a its soft glimmer. The sensation is brought on by the     counterpointing of past greatness with present wretchedness and mediocrity.” In Welsh, Hiraeth is the word for a homesickness tinged with grief and sadness. I’m sure there are others!

Assignment for students taking credits 

Johannes Hofer, the Swiss medical student who invented the term “nostalgia” cites an “afflicted imagination” or “disordered imagination” as a symptom of nostalgia. Drawing on any of the critical readings, at least one of the literary/cultural readings (listed below) and your answer to question 2 (above), please write 500-700 words in response to the following questions:

A: If an afflicted or disordered imagination is the symptom, then what are the causes of nostalgia? Or is the disordered imagination itself the cause?

B: How might children’s literature and culture cultivate a healthy imagination? Which works that we’ve read thus far might serve as remedies for unhealthy nostalgias?

This workshop offers a close look at influential avant-garde picturebooks of the early Soviet period as case studies of how revolutionary politics was manifest in radical picturebooks in both content and form before political pressures put an end to such aesthetic experiments. Through a close examination of these picturebook iconotexts, informed by a scholarly overview and detailed analysis provided by secondary sources, we discuss the impact of politics on children’s literature and aesthetics. We consider how Russian avant-garde picturebooks first flourished when revolutionary politics and aesthetics at first moved in tandem and when leading figures took refuge in children’s literature where comparatively greater freedom of expression still could be found. This period proved short-lived, however, since these innovative aesthetics rapidly proved too radical once the Bolsheviks consolidated power and children’s literature too began to suffer increasing censorship that ultimately doomed avant-garde experiments like these. Primary texts to be examined closely include early experiments by El Lissitzky and Vladimir Mayakovsky, influential picturebooks by Samuil Marshak and Vladimir Lebedev that mark a new flourishing of Soviet children’s literature, and, finally a picturebook by Osip Mandelstam that has Aesopian depths critical of an increasingly oppressive time that ultimately would take his life.

Required reading list

Primary Sources

Samuil Marshak and Vladimir Lebedev (illus). “Yesterday and Today.” The Circus and Other Stories. Trans. Stephen Capus. London: Tate Publishing, 2013. 

Samuil Marshak and Vladimir Lebedev (illus). “Ice Cream.” The Circus and Other Stories. Trans. Stephen Capus. London: Tate Publishing, 2013. 

Osip Mandelstam and Boris Ender (illus). “Two Trams.” The Fire Horse: Children’s Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky + Osip Mandelstam + Daniil Kharms. Trans. Eugene Ostashevsky. New York: The New York Review Children’s Collection, 2017, pp. 18-33.

El Lissitzky. About Two Squares: In 6 constructions: A Suprematist Tale. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. (optional)

Vladimir Mayakovsky and El Lissitzky (illus.). “The Tale of a Red Cap.” For the Voice. Trans. Peter France. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000, p. 43. (optional)

Samuil Marshak and Vladimir Lebedev (illus). Baggage. Trans. Jamey Gambrell. New York: Modern Museum of Art, 2012. (optional)

Secondary Sources

Evgeny Shteiner, Stories for Little Comrades: Revolutionary Artists and the Making of Early Soviet Children’s Books. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999, pp. 13-69. 

Sara Pankenier Weld. “Dual audience and double vision: Aesopian depths and hidden subtexts.” An Ecology of the Russian Avant-Garde Picturebook. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2018, pp. 79-92. (optional)

Preparatory task for all participants

All required readings will be provided. Read the assigned primary sources (6 picturebooks) and secondary sources (2 scholarly book chapters). Consider how politics is manifest within the picturebooks shown, whether in their content or form. If you wish, you might reflect on how similar forces might be at play in other regions or periods.

Assignment for students taking ECTS credits

Write a brief response paper considering the place of politics in these picturebooks or other works of children’s literature, including close examination of both form and content in your analysis. Submit the response paper to saraweld@ucsb.edu by July 15, 2024.

Baby books (including early-concept, concept, ABC, and counting books), are most often analysed in terms of their impact on the cognitive development of their readers. Only recently has more attention been given to their aesthetic properties in a special issue of Children’s Literature in Education titled “Aesthetic Approaches to Baby Books” published in November 2023. However, there is still much more to investigate concerning this type of book for very young children (i.e., under the age of 3).

The workshop aims to discuss the ideology in baby books. We will examine works from diverse cultural backgrounds, delving into the ideological layers of selected titles, methods to identify them, and potential impacts on both baby and adult readers. We will analyse various baby books covering diverse topics that participants will bring to the classroom and conduct a detailed analysis of one particular baby book. As a result, participants will gain a heightened awareness of baby books as diverse, complex, and not so innocent types of picturebooks.

Required reading list

Beauvais, Clémentine. ‘A is for Aesthetics: The Multisensory Beauty of Baby Books’. Children’s Literature in Education 54.3 (2023): 287–293 (Available here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-023-09550-y)

Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina and Jörg Meibauer. ‘Early-Concept Books and Concept Books’. The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks. Ed. Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. New York: Routledge, 2018. 38–48. (Available on Blackboard)

A baby book of your choice, preferably in your language or from your country. Bring a hard copy (or take pictures of it) so you can share it with others during the workshop.

Preparatory task for all participants

Read Clémentine Beauvais’s essay and reflect on your attitude towards baby books: Do you read/use/investigate them? Why or why not? Next, read Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Jörg Meibauer’s chapter on early-concept and concept books, and make notes useful for analysing baby books, paying attention to terms such as ‘categorisation’ and ‘prototype’. Finally, take a closer look at a baby book of your choice (preferably in your language/from your country) and reflect on it: Is there something funny, strange, surprising, or disturbing? Why? Come to the workshop with a hard copy of that book (or take pictures of it) and be prepared to share your thoughts with others.

Assignment for students taking credits

Referring to secondary source(s) from the reading list, analyse the ideology in a baby book of your choice, preferably in your language/from your country. Focus on verbal and visual strategies used to convey values and worldviews you identified in the book. The text should not exceed 700 words, but feel free to include any number of images. Send the Word or Pages file to km.rybak@uw.edu.pl before July 14th.

This workshop aims to encourage its participants to explore the use of photographs and various objects as memory triggers and tokens of memory in children’s and young adult literature, as well as the function of historical books as metaphorical seeds of next-generation memory (Świetlicki). Before the workshop, the participants will be asked to read three secondary sources (Hirsch, Olsen, Kamińska-Maciąg) and Katherine Marsh’s The Lost Year (2023), an acclaimed middle-grade novel showcasing the transcultural and intergenerational character of memory and the entanglements between present-day politics, history, and storytelling. Applying the frameworks of memory studies, during the workshop, the participants 1) will study the meaning of objects and photographs in Marsh’s novel - set in the 1930s and the 2020s; 2) discuss the intersections between politics, history, and agency in books for young people; and 3) examine the mnemonic/storytelling potential of childhood photographs and objects.

Required reading list

Primary sources
Marsh, Katherine. The Lost Year. ‎Roaring Brook Press, 2023.

 
Secondary sources
Olsen, Bjørnar. In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects. AltaMira Press; Reprint edition, 2013. (chapter “Futures for Things: Memory Practices and Digital Translation” pp. 102-135).
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Harvard University Press, 2012. (chapter “Past Lives” pp. 241-270).
Kamińska-Maciąg, Sylwia. “Postmemory of Stalinist Repressions and the Siege of Leningrad in Olga Lavrentieva’s Graphic Novel Survilo (2019)” Children’s Literature in Education 2023 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-023-09553-9

Preparatory task for all participants

Read the assigned secondary sources and Katherine Marsh’s The Lost Year. Bring to class an old family photograph and an object that has had a special meaning to you since when you were a child. Be prepared to talk about their significance.

Assignment for students taking credits   

In 500-600 words, discuss how photographs and/or objects function as memory triggers, tokens of memory, or seeds of memory in a selected children’s or young adult book. Use one of the theoretical concepts discussed during the workshop. Submit your paper by July 15 to mateusz.swietlicki@uwr.edu.pl

How does children’s literature depict motherhood and prepares readers for it? During this workshop, we delve into the portrayal of mothers and mothering in illustrated children’s literature, particularly focusing on dolls and doll stories. Central to our examination is the question whether ‘matrifocal narratives’, stories centered around the mother’s perspective, are possible within literature that has children as it’s main target group.

After an introduction to key concepts from motherhood studies, we scrutinise some examples of historical and contemporary illustrated children’s fiction. Finally, we will try to craft ‘matrifocal narratives’ for children ourselves. By reimagining existing picturebooks, we contemplate diverse perspectives on mothering and explore how these might manifest in children’s literature. What stories emerge if we try to cover various possible perspectives on mothering, including the maternal experience?

Required reading

Aurore Petit, Une maman c’est comme une maison. Les Fourmis rouges, 2019. (or any translation you understand: A mother is a house, Een mama is als een huis, Uma maē é como uma casa…)

[children's book tba]

Greenstone, Daniel. “The Sow in the House: The Unfulfilled Promises of Feminism in Ian Falconer’s Olivia Books.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 33 no. 1, 2008, pp. 26-40. https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2008.0004.

O’Reilly, Andrea. “Matricentric Feminism. A feminism for mothers”. The Routledge Companion to Motherhood. Eds. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein, Andrea O’Reilly, and Melinda Vandenbeld Giles. London/New York: Routledge, 2020. pp. 51-60.

Preparatory task for all participants

Read the assigned secondary sources and picturebooks. Reflect on your own understanding of key elements in the representation of motherhood and mothering: What is a mother? Who is allowed to be a mother? What is mothering? And how can these be portrayed in children’s books?

Assignment for students taking credits

Write an essay of 500-700 words about the way mothering is portrayed in a children’s book of your choice, building on the concepts we used during the workshop and considering its affordances to question common discourses on motherhood and mothering. Submit your assignment to frauke.pauwels@uantwerpen.be by 15 July 2024.