Fictions of Childhood

On one level this will be a seminar on literature written for school-aged children, including some basic introduction to major genres and selected writers of texts written in English for a child audience, and exploring particularly the question of the child as reader/ auditor and the figure of the child as stranger or outsider. However, we will also look at fictions written for adults that let us raise questions about the representation of children and childhood in the late nineteenth and, particularly the twentieth centuries. Specific themes may include: children and fantasy; childhood and memory or (forbidden) knowledge; the relation of child and adult worlds; the experience of violence and sexuality and the shifting representation of racial and cultural difference. Final projects will ask students to pursue these questions, and others of their choice, in texts published since 2001. The class may include the opportunity for community-based experience, involving an additional time commitment (contact instructor in January). Students should have college-level background in studying literary texts. Background in psychology, history, cultural studies, or education is desirable but not required.