Introduction to Children's Literature

            

           

            Around ten o’clock on Tuesday I left for my first Children’s Literature lecture. It took me some time though to find the correct location of the classes. I had “RW 117” written in my calendar and I knew that was in one of the laboratory buildings. I checked on the U of T map and saw that the building marked “RW” was across from the Robarts library. My mistake though was that I associated the RW building with another lab building nearby on Wilcocks, where I’ve also had lectures. That one is called the Lash Miller building, or “LM”. I went inside and started looking around for RW 117, thinking that RW must take up a section of LM. After walking around for a while I finally asked someone. As soon as I said, “Excuse me!” I could tell the guy, who looked like a professor, felt tiredly burdened by the prospect of having to talk to me. I asked if he knew where I could find RW 117. He looked puzzled. “This is chemistry!” he said, hoping that would clear things up and relieve him of me. I tried to explain my problem and that I thought RW was part of the LM building but he didn’t know what the hell I was on about. Finally I left and went outside to see if there was a sign with RW on it in front of another building. Once I was on the street it dawned on me that I wasn’t on Harbord, where Robarts is.

I went back to my bike and rode it to Harbord where I found the Ramsey Wright zoological labs. Lecture hall 117 was just inside, but there was another class in session. Some of my fellow Children’s Literature students were waiting outside in the hallway. I would say that 80% of those students were women of about twenty and the rest were men of the same age.

The other lecture ran late. When we piled in a lot of the students from whatever class it was were still there. The professor from that class was at the front with her three TAs and one of them was wearing a bow tie. I’ll bet he thinks bow ties are cool.

Our professor’s name is Deirdre Baker. The first thing she told us was that she is comfortable with books but not with computers, so she might have problems changing the slides with her laptop.

Deirdre spent the first half of the lecture going over the syllabus with us. The first work will be E. Nesbit’s “The Story of the Treasure Seekers”, which she says uses an old kind of writing for children, but at the same time looks forward to the realism that will later become the trend.

The second piece we will be studying is J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, which she told us began as a play in which the story would change from performance to performance.

The third book, Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons” is one that was totally unfamiliar to me. This is considered to be the first summer holiday story in children’s lit and the author was actually suspected of being a double agent for the Russians.

Next will be Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”, which she said played with the Victorian adventure style and changed what was possible for children’s literature. It was one of the type of books that Ursula Nordstrom, an influential children’s book editor called, “Good books for bad children.”

Rounding out the first month of the course will be Elizabeth Wein’s “Code Name Verity, which Professor Baker told us harks back to an older style but the imagery is absorbed in the text.

The first four weeks fall under the heading of “Islands, Survival and Empire”. For the second four week set, she gave it the category of “historical fiction”.

The first of these will be a “A Coyote Columbus Story” by Thomas King, whose work I encountered in my Canadian Short Stories course, and who I found to be very a very good and creative writer. “A Coyote Columbus Story” was later adapted as a children’s picture book.

The second will be “The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing” by M.T. Anderson.

Deirdre said that both of the above novels boldly confront taken for granted patterns.

Of all the texts, she encouraged us to read them before researching them.

The next story will be Sherman Alexie’s young adult novel, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”.

At this point our instructor demonstrated her opening statement by getting a student to help her move to the next slide. I think the only English professors I’ve had so far that didn’t fumble at least a bit with the technology needed to give lectures was the one who taught Digital Text and the one who taught Science Fiction.

The heading for week seven was “Fragile World, confronting mortality and time” and the works under that title were “Charlotte’s Web” and “Tom’s Midnight Garden”.

Week eight’s heading is “Friends” and she said it serves as a compliment to “Where the Wild Things Are”.

“Harriet the Spy” broke ground because the protagonist is a child without a traditional sense of propriety and her story does not have a comfortable moral ending.

She told us that all the texts work in conversation with one another.

George Macdonald, who wrote “The Princess and the Goblin”, was a friend of Lewis Carroll and a big influence on C.S. Lewis.

She told us that this course requires two essays, two prose analyses, some in-class writing and a couple of non-graded writing projects that we need to do to get our ten percent mark for participation. Of the prose analyses we will need to do close reading of a segment of text and talk about how it carries its weight and meaning. We should also talk about how what is not said affects the meaning of the story.

One of the non-graded projects will be to write about a picture book that affected us. I asked if we could use a comic book and she said “Absolutely!” She said she should have a graphic novel as part of the course material but there’s only so much space.

Also for our participation mark we are expected to send her by email our thoughts about the stories, but preferably before the lecture that covers it.

She said that children’s literature is very new as a field of academic study. It’s also unique in that it’s the only literature defined by age. We should be asking ourselves though, questions like, “Does it work for children?” and “Is it appropriate for children?” We should also keep in mind that these authors are adults writing for children and adults have power over children.

She told us that children’s literature tends to maintain an explicit liaison between instruction and delight. It has its roots in books meant entirely to instruct children in proper manners and religion. But it began to move away from this when children began to make choices according to what they liked from among what was available in adult literature, such as stories of King Arthur, John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” and Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”.

She says that there is a lot of bad writing these days as hack writers try to churn out imitations of popular trends.

She gave us a list of reasons why authors write books for children. One is out of didacticism. A sense that children need to be instructed.  Another is nostalgia for one’s own childhood, as was the case for A. A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame and J.M. Barrie.

Another reason that writers find their muse in children’s lit is simply because a child needs a story, as was the case for Astrid Lindgren, whose daughter was sick and so she just began making up the story of Pippi Longstocking to entertain her.

Sometimes authors are just driven by the need for money. Lucy Maud Montgomery got tired of writing about Anne, but she couldn’t afford to quit.

Another reason children’s stories get written is because that’s just the way the stories come out.

She told us that the most powerful children’s stories don’t talk down to children, and so when we are reading them we shouldn’t look down on them either. She urged us to avoid the word “cute” when responding to these works. 

She reminded us that many of us are only recently out of childhood ourselves. I assume she was referring to me, but I couldn’t tell how she knew.

During the halftime break I introduced myself to Deirdre Baker and brought up the idea that these stories are written by adults. I told her about the stories that I had my daughter make up and how they reminded me of the Native oral tradition stories in which things appear and disappear suddenly and that they were a lot more violent than the stories that adults write for children.

After the break, she talked about our first author, E. Nesbit. She said that her work is inspired by British adventure stories of the past in which authors convey that the whole world would be a better place if they all learned to be like the British in both religion and manner, but looks forward to the post Victorian era. She keeps the adventure but leaves out the British evangelism.

Nesbit was an unconventional Victorian lady, who bobbed her hair, didn’t wear corsets, she rolled her own cigarettes and smoked like a factory and was pregnant at the time of her marriage. She grew up playing with her brothers and turned out both adventurous and headstrong. “The Story of the Treasure Seekers” is based on her own experiences growing up. Her own children have said that she was often very childish even among them. She would throw tantrums at the dinner table and then would stomp away like an angry kid.

Nesbit’s husband, Hubert Bland, secretly had another wife that he would spend part of the week with. When Nesbit was recovering from a stillbirth, the woman who was hired to take care of her somehow got pregnant while she was staying there. Bland’s business partner absconded with their company’s funds, leaving the family dependent on Nesbit’s book sales.

Nesbit and her husband were Fabianists, who strived towards socialism through democratic means as opposed to revolution. Oddly though, Nesbit was opposed to women achieving the vote. Her and her husband were two of the nine founding members, which attracted prominent public figures such as H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. The meetings were at their house in the country where members would go to spend an exciting weekend of discussion. H. G. Wells said that there was always a rush to get the earliest train out of London, because those who arrived first would actually get a bed.

We read the first two paragraphs of “The Story of the Treasure Seekers”. I was surprised that so many students had a lot of astute observations about it. I thought it was interesting that the children set about to find treasure in order to save the family from its fallen fortunes.

After the lecture I rode up to Yonge and Hillsdale, across to Mt Pleasant and down to Davisville to get back to Yonge again. As I was descending the hill where Yonge Street dips beside the graveyard, a woman in black passed me. She was large and short but with most of her weight divided equally in her chest and her hips in such a way as to be considered voluptuous. Her movements though were not particularly sensual. They were jerky and desperate as she pumped her short legs frantically to try to stay ahead of me.  Passed her during my ascent from the cemetery and though she almost caught up with me a few times along the way, I stayed comfortably ahead until south of Bloor Street, when I became more interested in the buildings than our little race.

That evening, after I’d finished doing some exercises, I went out to the kitchen and saw that several cans of cat food had been left for me at my open door. Later on when I saw my upstairs neighbour, David, I thanked him. He was very upset at the guy who lives at the top of the stairs on my floor. David has been keeping a covered e-bike outside on the deck for several months. The guy at the top of the stairs is the only tenant with a door that opens out onto the deck and I guess he had been annoyed that David had been keeping the bike on the end of the deck where his apartment happens to exit to. It’s not as if he has some sort of right to that part of the deck but he decided to move David’s bike to the other end and inadvertently broke the mirror and the pedal. David tried to talk to him about it but he apparently refused.

That night, I heard shouting out on Queen Street and there was a verbal altercation going on between Bernice Sampson, a woman I’ve known in Parkdale since the late 80s when she was a crack addict and prostitute. I even mentioned her in a poem I wrote back then. About six years ago her daughter was killed by some people she trusted to care for her, but Bernice is still the loudest person on Queen Street. I know she volunteers at PARC and she knows everyone on the streets of Parkdale. The person she was arguing with is the West Indian guy who gets drunk almost every night and shouts at people, quite often challenging them to fights that never happen. On this night the guy called Bernice a “nigger”. Bernice’s response was, “I know what your mother is!”