Jellyfish, Lions, and Ducks: Sideways Spirals of Growth in Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport

Focusing on the felt experience of consciousness, Lucy Ellmann's novel for adults Ducks, Newburyport (2019) undermines clear distinctions between the human protagonist's child and adult selves. Alongside references to non-human animals by this human narrator, entire sections present a mountain lioness's perspective. This essay places the concept of growing sideways from queer studies and children's literature scholarship into dialogue with cognitive literary studies to examine the human protagonist's spiralling between child/adult and human/non-human.

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Kideogames: Reimagining the Fringe of Literary Studies as the Forefront

Games and Culture ◽

10.1177/1555412019841476 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 15 (7) ◽

pp. 772-788

Author(s):

Emma Reay

Keyword(s):

Children's Literature ◽

Children’S Literature ◽

Literary Studies ◽

Games Studies ◽

Permanent Home ◽

Low Culture ◽

The Impact ◽

Literary Canons ◽

The Way ◽

Academic Study

The absence of children’s texts and ludic texts from traditional literary canons, curricula, journals, and conferences might appear obvious, practical, and natural—a straightforward reflection of theoretical and methodological divergence, and of the way texts are grouped outside of academic study. However, these seemingly self-evident explanations do not hold up under scrutiny. In this article, I posit that the omission of children’s texts and ludic texts from well-developed scholarly contexts is partly rooted in the ideological collocation of “children,” “play,” and “low culture.” I compare the strategies used by children’s literature studies and games studies to manage their marginalization and conclude that irrespective of the quality, the variety, the relevance, and the impact of research conducted within these two disciplines, neither will find a permanent home in the serious, sophisticated, “adults-only” space of the literature faculty. I ask whether this is necessarily a problem, and suggest that - when consciously embraced - the lightness of illegitimacy may be a potent as the heft of tradition. Finally, I advocate for an intersectional alliance between children's literature studies and games studies and explore some of the ways in which this kind of academic solidarity might counter the marginalizing effects of infantilization.

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Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Children’s Literature, and the Case of Jeff Smith

Handbook of Research on Children's and Young Adult Literature ◽

10.4324/9780203843543.ch24 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

Roderick McGillis

Keyword(s):

Children's Literature ◽

Cultural Studies ◽

Children’S Literature ◽

Literary Studies

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The Silencing of Children’s Literature

Barnboken ◽

10.14811/clr.v43i0.477 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Sara Pankenier Weld

Keyword(s):

Children's Literature ◽

Children’S Literature ◽

Premature Death ◽

Literary Studies ◽

Soviet Regime ◽

Literary Scholarship ◽

Literature Research ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Adults And Children ◽

Daniil Kharms

The silencing of childhood continues in discrimination against children’s literature today. Yet children’s literature should be taken seriously not only for its own sake. Children’s literature can and should illuminate our understanding of literature for adults, while literature for adults can and should illuminate our understanding of children’s literature. Failure to recognize this mutualism risks silencing children’s literature and ghettoizing children’s literature research while impoverishing literary studies. To show the value of examining literature for all audiences together, this article examines the example of silenced Russian writer Daniil (Yuvachev) Kharms, a late avant-garde and absurdist writer who wrote in the 1920s and 1930s before his premature death as a result of repression by the Soviet regime. Like that of others who wrote for both adults and children, Kharms’s example illustrates the arbitrariness of subdividing the literary production of one individual into two mutually exclusive categories. In the case of Daniil Kharms, and others, literary scholarship benefits from examining an author’s oeuvre collectively and disregarding the bifurcation of audiences of which literary studies may at times be guilty. To show this, the present article focuses on the example of the little old lady, a marginal figure who recurs in Kharms’s writings regardless of audience, including in the children’s picturebook O tom kak starushka chernila pokupala (How a Little Old Lady Went Shopping for Ink, 1929) and the absurdist novella for adults “Starukha” (The Old Woman, 1939). Examining the old lady as an anachronistic wizened old muse and embodiment of writing itself across these boundaries in Kharms’s authorship illuminates the theme of silencing across both realms of the author’s oeuvre, since this figure, who stands for Kharms’s silenced authorship itself, embodies Kharms’s own marginalization, silencing, and censorship. Ultimately this article argues for the reunification of divided audiences to repair the fissure dividing the fields of children’s literature and literature for adults.

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A Critical Queer Literacy Approach to Teaching Children’s Literature about Same-Sex Parenting

Advances in Early Childhood and K-12 Education - Critical Practice in P-12 Education ◽

10.4018/978-1-4666-5059-6.ch010 ◽

2014 ◽

pp. 223-242 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Aubry Threlkeld

Keyword(s):

Children's Literature ◽

Critical Pedagogy ◽

Critical Literacy ◽

Queer Studies ◽

Children’S Literature ◽

Same Sex ◽

Normative Practices ◽

Approach To Teaching ◽

Same Sex Parents ◽

Queer Pedagogy

Too often, critical literacy and critical pedagogy are complicit in maintaining silence around issues of sexuality. Similarly, queer pedagogues often focus on generalized descriptions of homophobia, heterosexism, or heteronormativity without addressing white, gender, and middle-class normativities. This chapter blends two approaches—critical literacy and queer pedagogy—to focus on what Kevin Kumashiro (2002) refers to as “participation in” normative practices when teaching children’s literature about same-sex parenting. Queer studies terminology like heteronormativity and homonormativity are used to describe children’s literature taught in elementary schools. Particularly children’s literature on same-sex parenting is reviewed from a critical perspective. The cases discussed illustrate how teaching children’s literature about same-sex parents in elementary school classrooms can disrupt heteronormative goals while resisting homonormative ones. In the end, the author issues a call for additional examples of critical queer literacy that can be instantiated in practice and support critical engagement for students, teachers, and communities.

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