The School of Bourgeois Religion: Jewish Children, Emotions, and the Hebrew Bible

Author(s):  
Dorothea M Salzer

Abstract Children’s literature, conceptualized as a means of enculturation, is a vehicle for transmitting a society’s or community’s shared values, and is designed to mould children’s behaviour according to what is thought appropriate. As such, it is a powerful cultural agent and consequently a valuable source in the historical study of emotions. This article sets out to explore what can be gained from looking at literature designed for the religious education of Jewish children as sources that shed light on the role of emotions in the process of religious modernization in Judaism. Based on the assumption that feelings are to be viewed as a form of knowledge which is transmitted, acquired, and acted out in specific cultural contexts, several criteria for analysing the verbalization, representation, and use of emotions in Jewish children’s literature are outlined by focusing on the subgenre of Jewish children’s bibles. This analysis allows us to explore how emotions unfolded in educational literature, and how they became an integral and transformative part of religious knowledge, self-assertion, (re)definition, and identity formation at a time of tremendous change for Judaism.

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Joosen

Compared to the attention that children's literature scholars have paid to the construction of childhood in children's literature and the role of adults as authors, mediators and readers of children's books, few researchers have made a systematic study of adults as characters in children's books. This article analyses the construction of adulthood in a selection of texts by the Dutch author and Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award winner Guus Kuijer and connects them with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's recent concept of ‘childism’ – a form of prejudice targeted against children. Whereas Kuijer published a severe critique of adulthood in Het geminachte kind [The despised child] (1980), in his literary works he explores a variety of positions that adults can take towards children, with varying degrees of childist features. Such a systematic and comparative analysis of the way grown-ups are characterised in children's texts helps to shed light on a didactic potential that materialises in different adult subject positions. After all, not only literary and artistic aspects of children's literature may be aimed at the adult reader (as well as the child), but also the didactic aspect of children's books can cross over between different age groups.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
А.Б. Бритаева

В представленной статье на материале произведений Музафера Дзасохова известного современного осетинского писателя, поэта, публициста, переводчика, рассматриваются художественные особенности лирической прозы, а именно, автобиографической повести в осетинской детской литературе. Повесть Весенние звезды (1973) и ее продолжение На берегу Уршдона Барагун (1981) стали началом эпопеи о жизни отдельно взятой семьи, а на их примере всей страны в тяжелые послевоенные годы. В качестве одной из важнейших констант художественного мира писателя рассматривается образ детства. В ходе анализа особое внимание уделяется преобладанию нравственного аспекта, актуализации проблемы регулятивно-воспитательной функции национального этикета, ценностно-нормативных ориентиров осетинской ментальности. С опорой на биографический и историко-генетический методы, основное внимание в исследовании акцентируется на темах послевоенного детства, роли семьи и общества в формировании нравственных ориентиров, в становлении личности, образе матери, теме памяти, а также на художественном осмыслении этих проблем и тем в автобиографических повестях писателя. Типологически воплощение детской темы в творчестве М. Дзасохова во многом опирается на традицию изображения детства в русской автобиографической прозе XX в. В заключительной части сформулированы выводы, отражающие особенности лирической прозы в творчестве М. Дзасохова, обозначено место автобиографических повестей автора в контексте осетинской детской литературы второй половины XX века.Актуальность и научная новизна работы обусловлены недостаточной исследованностью истории и проблем осетинской детской литературы. Результаты исследования могут быть использованы при написании истории осетинской детской литературы. The present article examines the artistic features of lyrical prose, namely, autobiographical story in the Ossetian childrens literature in the works of Muzafer Dzasokhov, a well-known modern Ossetian writer, poet, publicist, translator. The story Spring Stars (1973) and its continuation - On the Bank of Ursdon Baragun ... (1981) marked the beginning of an epic about the life of a family, and via their fates the author shows life of the whole country in the difficult post-war years. The theme of childhood is considered as one of the most important constants of the writers artistic world. In the course of the analysis, special attention is paid to the predominance of the moral aspect, the actualization of the problem of the regulatory and educational function of national etiquette, the value and normative guidelines of the Ossetian mentality. The focus of the study is based on biographical and historical-genetic methods and highlights the themes of post-war childhood, the role of the family and society in the formation of moral guidelines, in the formation of personality, the image of the mother, the theme of memory, as well as on the artistic understanding of these problems and topics in autobiographical novels of the writer. Typologically, the embodiment of the childrens theme in the works of M. Dzasokhov is largely based on the tradition of depicting childhood in Russian autobiographical prose of the XXth century. The formulated conclusions in the final part reflect the peculiarities of lyrical prose in the works of M. Dzasokhov, the place of the authors autobiographical stories is indicated in the context of Ossetian childrens literature of the second half of the XXth century. The relevance and scientific novelty of the work are due to insufficient research on the history and problems of Ossetian childrens literature. The results of the study can be used in writing the history of Ossetian childrens literature.


2021 ◽  
pp. 219-237
Author(s):  
Nataliia Yakubovska ◽  
Halyna Kutasevych ◽  
Kateryna Balakhtar

The translation of children’s literature has certain specificities because it must be subject to several constraints: taking into account the double recipient in children’s literature (child and adult), the educational purpose, the diastratic variation, etc. Wonderful Neighbors (2016) by Hélène Lasserre is a children’s book about difference, tolerance and living together. The gap between French and Ukrainian cultures leads to problems with the perception of socio-cultural realia by readers of the target language who sometimes misunderstand or even reject them. In this intervention, we analyze the perception of the album by the readership of the source and target culture based on the comments of the readers which will allow understanding the editorial strategies and the choices of translation procedures made by the translators. In particular, we study the text-image relationships and the influence of extralinguistic factors on the lexical level. In a second step, it is necessary to analyze the role of the educational purpose which may provide for certain censorship of children’s text to which the translator must obey in order to meet the demands of a publisher and his/her readership.


2021 ◽  
pp. 71-108
Author(s):  
Marilisa Jiménez García

This chapter centers on the education and role of “ethnic” librarians during the founding and professionalization of children’s literature and librarianship at the New York Public Library, tracing a legacy back to Afro-Boricua public pedagogies in Puerto Rico. This chapter also analyzes the centrality of Blackness and activism project of Latinx children’s literature as a US tradition grounded in the work of librarians of color, interweaving the stories of Pura Belpré and Arturo Schomburg, both key figures in the Harlem Renaissance and history of African American and AfroLatinx literature.


Author(s):  
Rebekah Sheldon

In the conclusion of The Child to Come, the book asks, ‘What happens when the life figured by the child--innocent, self-similar human life at home on a homely Earth--no longer has the strength to hold back the vitality that animates it?’ This chapter looks at two kinds of texts that consider this question: Anthropocene cinema and Young Adult Fiction. By focusing on the role of human action, the Anthropocene obscures a far more threatening reality: the collapse of the regulative. In relation, both children’s literature and young adult literature grow out of and as disciplinary apparatuses trained on that fraught transit between the presumptive difference of those still in their minority and the socially necessary sameness that is inscribed into fully attained adulthood.


Author(s):  
Adriana Chira

Berlin 1996 (cited under Overviews) introduced the term “Atlantic Creoles” to describe Afro-descendants whose experiences in the age of the Atlantic slave trade were not primarily defined by the plantation. According to Berlin, Atlantic Creoles distinguished themselves through behaviors that “were more akin to those of confident, sophisticated natives than of vulnerable newcomers.” They displayed “linguistic dexterity, cultural plasticity, and social agility.” The term “Creole” is supposed to denote transformations in identity through encounters across cultural difference. Berlin applied this term to a generation that preceded the consolidation of plantation systems (prior to the 18th century), even though he alluded to the possibility of using this concept spatially, too—to describe Afro-descendants living outside plantation systems as late as the end of the 18th century. Landers 1999 (cited under Overviews) took up this latter approach systematically. Scholars have since applied the label “Atlantic Creoles” broadly to cultural and political brokers who drew on repertoires from Africa, Europe, and the Americas as seamen, traders, diplomats, litigants, settlers, wives, workers, or healers. According to Berlin, the term was not meant to obscure the violence that Afro-descendants were subjected to, but to capture a historical moment when racial categories were more fluid and some could access opportunities. Berlin’s piece has a vast legacy. It drew attention to an array of Afro-diasporic experiences and emphasized the role of West Africans in the making of early Atlantic networks. Since 1996, attention to Africans in Atlantic networks has expanded. Scholars have also examined more closely how their actions and trajectories can shed light on the arc of African history, not just the American one. Yet some scholars have critiqued the term “Atlantic Creoles” for excessive capaciousness. In Ferreira 2012 (cited under 18th Century and the Age of Revolutions), Roquinaldo Ferreira argues that it obliterates the specificity of African experiences within pluralistic communities in Africa. Other scholars have critiqued it for romanticizing mobility and insertion into state apparatuses. Upward mobility for some Afro-descendants could often only come with fewer opportunities for enslaved people. Finally, the term assumes a somewhat linear identity formation. In Sweet 2013 (cited under Healing, Religion, and Science), James Sweet argues that historians too often assume that Creole Afro-descendant identities move away from African cosmologies toward Western ones.


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