Historical stories in children’s literature in Iraq (narrative production in the eighties as an example): القصص التاريخي في أدب الأطفال في العراق (النتاج القصصي في الثمانينيات –أنموذجاً- )

This study aimed to highlight the historical story directed at child in Iraq during 1980s, a decade that witnessed a remarkable prosperity and development of children's literature. The study also focused on the role of Children's Culture House, the official sponsor of child's culture in Iraq, in presenting and enriching this kind of story. Moreover, the study explained the circumstances of that historical phase and its implications on the child's story in general and the historical story in particular. The study also covered the methods and means of writers in dealing with facts and events of history and presenting them to the child in line with the requirements of children's literature. The study then supported the theory with an artistic analysis of a historical story published at that point.

The Anthropomorphized Animal In Children’s Culture

The reliance on animals in children’s literature over the past two centuries has become a key means by which the civilizing process that children go through has been mediated by the animal body. Children are asked both implicitly and explicitly to identify with animals, but then to position themselves as distinctly human through the mode of their interactions with both lived animals and those depicted in literature and film. This core question of identity formation – child/adult, animal/human – forms the foundation of my dissertation, which investigates the overlapping, double-sided rhetorics addressing children, childhood and animals. My dissertation is organized into five areas of interest that pose complementary questions regarding the way in which relationships between animals and children inform and underscore adults’ lived relationships with both of them. Posthumanist scholarship, then, becomes a key means by which to de-prioritize a conception of an exclusively human subjectivity. Cary Wolfe in particular has recently worked to criticize liberal humanism and find ways to push cultural analysis beyond its inherent anthropocentrism in order to combat institutionalized speciesism, which continues to prioritize human beings, thereby excusing the exploitation or extermination of other species. What has been notably overlooked in posthumanism’s challenge to anthropocentric human liberalism, however, is how the human is encultured through literature geared specifically towards a child audience. By examining culturally significant and widely popular works of children’s culture through a posthumanist, or animality studies lens, I argue that Western philosophy’s objective to establish a notion of an exclusively human subjectivity is continually countered in the very texts that ostensibly work to configure human identity. Literature geared toward a child audience reflects and contributes to the cultural tensions created by the oscillation between upholding and undermining the divisions between the human and the animal. My dissertation focuses on the ways in which these works present the boundary between humans and animals as, at best, permeable and in a state of continual flux.

The Anthropomorphized Animal In Children’s Culture

The reliance on animals in children’s literature over the past two centuries has become a key means by which the civilizing process that children go through has been mediated by the animal body. Children are asked both implicitly and explicitly to identify with animals, but then to position themselves as distinctly human through the mode of their interactions with both lived animals and those depicted in literature and film. This core question of identity formation – child/adult, animal/human – forms the foundation of my dissertation, which investigates the overlapping, double-sided rhetorics addressing children, childhood and animals. My dissertation is organized into five areas of interest that pose complementary questions regarding the way in which relationships between animals and children inform and underscore adults’ lived relationships with both of them. Posthumanist scholarship, then, becomes a key means by which to de-prioritize a conception of an exclusively human subjectivity. Cary Wolfe in particular has recently worked to criticize liberal humanism and find ways to push cultural analysis beyond its inherent anthropocentrism in order to combat institutionalized speciesism, which continues to prioritize human beings, thereby excusing the exploitation or extermination of other species. What has been notably overlooked in posthumanism’s challenge to anthropocentric human liberalism, however, is how the human is encultured through literature geared specifically towards a child audience. By examining culturally significant and widely popular works of children’s culture through a posthumanist, or animality studies lens, I argue that Western philosophy’s objective to establish a notion of an exclusively human subjectivity is continually countered in the very texts that ostensibly work to configure human identity. Literature geared toward a child audience reflects and contributes to the cultural tensions created by the oscillation between upholding and undermining the divisions between the human and the animal. My dissertation focuses on the ways in which these works present the boundary between humans and animals as, at best, permeable and in a state of continual flux.

Child-creator: New European Paradigm Of Childhood Culture

The author explored the concept of "childhood culture" through the prism of the new European paradigm of culture and domestic cultural creation in the modern humanities. The revision of the concept of "childhood culture" is carried out in the context of polydisciplinarity, which combines anthropological, psychological, sociological, philosophical, aesthetic, art, ethnographic, pedagogical aspects of the analysis of the childhood phenomenon. The semantic polyvalences of "childhood culture" within the classical and non-classical paradigms were revealed. The new European paradigm of childhood culture is considered. The concept of "childhood" is substantiated, which is presented as a cultural phenomenon in which value, figurative, conceptual markers are accumulated, and at the same time a special semantic space is formed, defined by lexemes "child world", "children's creativity", "childhood culture", "children's communication". etc. The dynamics of the relationship between the concepts: "children's culture" — "children's creativity" — "children's festival" is highlighted. It is argued that the concept of "childhood culture" in the theory of culture is transformed into interdisciplinary tools, combining the perspective of cultural and historical dynamics of childhood and the theory of childhood in one methodological complex-concept. The concept of childhood culture is investigated through the prism of anthropological projection (V. Tabachkovsky, M. Mead), game concept of culture (J. Geizinga), cultural concept of aesthetic education (T. Krivosheya), existential point of wiev (J.-P. Sartre), psychoanalytic approach (Z. Freud), in the focus of everyday school "Annals" (F. Aries), hermeneutic pattern (P. Reeker), etc. The topology of children’s culture of the American researcher D. Kennedy is analyzed, which allowed to state the child-creator as a subject of cultural creation within its non-classical comprehension. Articulated phenomenon of "child-centeredness", which is based on even greater infantilization of society and totally affects all cultural practices (fashion, consumption, education, entertainment, etc.).