Children's Literature

Catalog description

As a child, what you read, or what is read to you, forms your first and foundational experience with literature. Moreover, what you read, and what is read to you, introduces you to the values that your culture holds dear. Despite its importance to individuals and their culture, we-instructors, students-only rarely approach children's literature with the same seriousness that we approach other works of literature. This course sets out to correct that. It assumes that texts like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, or Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! reward the kind of close and careful study that scholars and students usually reserve for more canonical works of literature. Students who take this course will leave it with a sense of the history and development of children's literature in English, the methods of studying children's literature, and, most of all, an understanding of how children's literature reproduces and occasionally challenges the values of the culture that produces and disseminates it. Its overall premise is that you can learn a lot about a culture-how it feels about childhood, race, gender, work, religion, and so on-by what that culture does and does not offer its children to read.