Fall 2010 course updates

Just wanted to post that the syllabi for ENG 272: Literature for the Middle Grades are available.  Click on the title of the course in the tan box above to go to the page for that course.  The syllabus for ENG 470: Children's Visual Culture is not yet available, but the course doesn't meet until tomorrow.  

An exhausting, hot summer ends, a new semester begins

I'm working on course syllabi for this semester -- for courses that begin next Tuesday, Aug. 24.  They'll be posted to the website on that date.

This has been a long and exhuasting summer.  The summer school graduate course was a great experience. I enjoyed discussing the academic experience with the graduate students and look forward to seeing them this fall. We shared many good ideas for creating course syllabi, which are coming in handy now.

But teaching the course was a little complicated by the slow healing of my broken foot.  But now, I am happy to report, that I'm walking, albeit with a slight limp, and am toward the end of recovery.  My mom and I last November

As soon as the doctors reported that I could walk, my family and I drove to Birmingham where my mother was becoming more sick and frail each day.  I spent the rest of the summer helping my parents.  My mother died at the beginning of August.  We had a wonderful memorial service at her church.  Her death is bittersweet as she was in great pain at the end, but until she became seriously ill, she had so much life and enthusiasm and had accomplished so much as a pharmacist, Lutheran church volunteer, environmentalist, world traveler, parent volunteer, Braille worker, artist, tennis player, and so much more it was always hard to keep up with her. Jodie and I wrote her obituary in the Birmingham News.  Here's a link: Betty Susina obituary

This has been a hot summer, hasn't it?  Seems as if some days it's been even warmer in central Illinois than in Birmingham.  Here's looking forward to cooler days ahead full of great days of literature courses.

Remembering Martin Gardner

I was saddened to learn of the death of Martin Gardner. He was a polymath with an infinite curiosity.  Like Martin Gardnermany children's literature scholars, I knew him best as the the compiler of the magnificant The Annotated Alice which was first published in 1960.  His book has gone through multiple editions including The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (1999).  

The Annotated Alice is a amazing compedium of all things Alice in which Gardner provides the text of the two Alice books along with citations and references to the the texts.  It is essential reading for anyone interested in a better understanding of the Alice books.  It has probably introduced more readers to a critical understanding of the Alice books than any other scholarly text.  It is without a doubt the best starting point for any reader who wants a better and more critical understanding of the Alice books and Lewis Carroll.  It the book that I encourage my students to begin their research in Alice.  To re-confirm The Annotated Alice was featured in the last season of Lost. Jack read the book in two different universes.

The Annotated Alice is a true print hypertext and was easily adapted into an eletronic version as well.  The popularity of The Annotated Alice inspired the publication of a number of other annotated versions of classic children's texts. But The Annotated Alice was the first and remains the best of the lot, although Michael Patrick Hearn's magnificant The Annotated Wzard of Oz, first published in 1973 and like Gardner's volume has gone through several editions is a close second. Gardner was originally planning on compiling The Annotated Wizard Oz, when he met Hearn, he gracefully stepped aside to allow the younger Hearn complete the task.

I was fortunate to be able to interview Martin Gardner for the journal, The Five Owls, through the efforts of my friend, Mark West, a children's literature scholar who teaches at the University of NC- Charlotte.  Mark and I drove up from Charlotte to visit Gardner in his home in Henderson, NC, in the fall of 1998. 

Meeting with Gardner was a amazing afternoon.  I don't ofen have  the opportunity to spend the day with a genius and Gardner was certainly that.  Although I knew him primarily for his work on Lewis Carroll, that was just one of his many interests.  It turned out he never really cared for Wonderland, preferring the fantasy of L. Frank Baum.  Gardner would help put back into print with his thoughtful introductions many of Baum's novels  that were published by Dover.  But what attracted him to Carroll was their mutual interest in recreational mathematics. One of Gardner's earlier jobs was being the compiler of the puzzle page for the children's magazine, Humpty Dumpty.

Gardner is perhaps best known for this long running Mathematical Games Column that appeared in Scientific American.  In this column and the many collections based on his column, Gardner would, as Carroll did in  A Tangled Tale, Pillow Problems, and The Game of Logic  provide readers with mathematical puzzles, paradoxes, and entertainments.  For those readers interested in this aspect of Carroll's career, I would strongly encourage them  to read Gardner's  The Universe in a Handkerchief: Lewis Carroll's Mathematical Recreations, Games, Puzzles and Word Plays  (1996).

Like Carroll, Gardner was a true man of letters and published some 80 books during his lifetime.  He would become curious in a topic, research, and then publish a book.  Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Godel, Escher, and Bach  (1979), has called Gardner, "one the great intellects produced in this country in this century." Hofstadter is correct, but in addition to being brillant, Garnder was also generous and kind.

Spending the day with Gardner, was for me as "a golden afternoon," which is how Carroll described the day The Annotated Alice, as it appeared in the television series Lost in March 2010that he first told Alice Liddell and her sisters the oral version of Wonderland.  We talked, drank tea, and he showed me his library, and his work office. When I entered his office, I was astonished. There I saw an old fashion writing desk, which allows the writer to stand while doing his composing.  This is how Gardner wrote which is  the same way the Carroll composed.  In that moment, I realized that the reason that Gardner has such insights and understanding of  Carroll is that his own life and thought process echoed that of the famous children's writer and mathematican.  Both were infinitately curious and imaginative.  It was the closest I have ever been to meeting Carroll. 

I wrote up the interview in the article "Conversation with Martin Gardner: The Annotator of Wonderland," published in the Jan./Feb. 2000 issue of The Five Owls.  

There was a thoughtful obituary of Martin Gardner published in the May 23, 2010 issue of the The New York Times, but I thought some readers might want to read my interview with Gardner.  He will be greatly missed, but his work endures.

Andrea Immel's Presentation on Fables

Why do we prefer fairy tales over fables?  In her presentation, "The Fable that Morphed: Retelling The Wenceslaus Hollar 'Of the Court Mouse, and Country Mouse' 1665 Etching From 'The fables of Aesop paraphras'd in verse by John Ogilby'Town and Country Mouse," Andrea Immel, the director of the Cotsen Children's Library at Princeton University Library, raised this fascinating question during her lively discussion of four versions of the famous fable illustrated and retold by John Ogilby, William Godwin, Thomas Bewick, and Beatrix Potter.

Immel presented her talk, sponsored by the Center for Children's Books and the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, at the University of Illinois on May 6.  As I listened to her lecture, like all good presentations, Immel got me to thinking about the differences between fables and fairy tales.

I, too, have also thought it was a bit curious that John Locke, in his influential Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), should praise the fable, but condemn the fairy tale.  Both are fantastical stories often involving talking animals and in many, although not all cases, point to moral.  Is "Little Red Riding Hood" less moralizing or didactic that "The Town and Country Mouse."

It is true that most fables do have the moral tacked on to the conclusion as was  the case of Charles Perrault's Histories, ou contes du temps passe, avec des Moralitez (1697), his collection of fairy tales that was published only four years after Some Thoughts Concerning Education. It is also true that often times fairy tales have been liberated from the overt moral that has hung over the conclusion of fables. But a moral can often times been easily teased out. One of the reasons fairy tales  were assigned as appropriate reading for children is that they combined instruction and delight.

But over the years, as Immel noted, fables have earned the reputation of being simply didatic, while fairy talesJerry Pinkney's The Lion and the Mouse (2009) were seen as more entertainment.  But she showed how different retellers or illustrators can discover differing morals in the same fable, which is a common practice with fairy tales.  But perhaps a more significant difference between fairy tales and fables are that many fairy tales are wishfulfillment, while fables are survival stories that show how to negoitate in a world of unequal distribution of power.  While most of us would want to be Cinderella, who wants to be the country mouse, or even the town mouse?

But given the recent economic downturns, which have made clear the distinctions between the haves and the have nots--Wall Street vs Main Street, perhaps we are about to experience a revival of fables.  With Jerry Pinkney winning the Caldecott Award for his  picture book retelling of Lion and the Mouse (2009) perhaps we moving into new era of the fable.

Little Black Sambo controversy in Japan

The controversy over Helen Bannerman's Little Black Sambo continues.  This time the problems are surfacing again in Japan, which has a long history of misinterpreting images that are considered in racist in the U.S. but are sometimes seen as 'cute' in that country. Just learned that I am a source in an April 13, 2010, article in Japan Times: " 'Sambo' racism row reignites over kids' play: The 1899 book still making waves in 21st-century Japan."  Writer Matthew Chozick has a quotation from my essay “Reviving or Revising Helen Bannerman’s The Story of Little Black Sambo: Postcolonial Hero or Signifying Monkey?”  in Voices of the Other: Children’s Literature and the Postcolonial Context edited by Roderick McGillis  (Garland, 1999: 223-52).

The Sambo book is complicated as the story, in and of itself, appeals to many children and was never Little Black Sambo reinterpreted with positive African-American images by Julius Lester and Jerry Pinkneyintended by Bannerman to be racist.  Unfortunately, the images most associated with the children's book are also connected with negative stereotype images of African-Americans.  Bannerman did not set the story in the United States; it grew out of her experiences living in India.  Still, it is important to respect that some African-Americans see some of the Sambo illustrations as racist.  On the other hand, Julius Lester and Jerry Pinkney have re-interpreted the story to incorporate positive illustrations of African-Americans: Sam and the Tigers: A Retelling of 'Little Black Sambo' (Puffin: 2000).