English 477
Children's Literature Reconsidered

Introduction

Learning Objectives

First, some nuts and bolts: in this course, you'll be asked to read a number of classic stories for children and write a total of eight short, two- or three-page papers about what you've read. At the end, you'll take a final exam.

I won't push any particular theory of children's literature or require you to take any particular view of what you read. I want you to read the assigned stories alertly, energetically, and with interest; and I want you to work out as clearly as you can, in writing, some of your reactions to what you've read. In this course guide and the discussion topics I propose in it, I attempt to direct your attention to elements in the stories that, I know from experience, bear discussion. Beyond that, I want to know what you think.

Course Goal

The overarching goal of the course is to help students define elements of the classic children's story and their relationship to a child's development within a social context.

Classics of Children's Literature contains a number of stories and poems beyond those assigned in this course. Although you are not required to read them for the purposes of this course, you may want to look into them on your own. Reading them can extend considerably your in-depth knowledge of classic children's literature.

About the Online Environment

Your online course offers several advantages to the traditional classroom, including the comprehensive Online Student Handbook, the ability to communicate electronically with students and with your instructor, and links to a rich array of online resources.

Online Student Handbook

This handbook answers questions about your online learning course, such as how to purchase your text, schedule an exam, obtain a transcript, and get technical help if you need it. The handbook also provides additional resources, such as how to order books or journals from the library and how to study for an online course.

Communication with Your Instructor and Student Peers

• Online Discussion Forums, designed by the University of Washington award winning Catalyst team, allow you to communicate with other currently enrolled students and with your instructor. We encourage you to use the forum to exchange ideas, resources, and comments about your course work with other students in this course. This unstructured forum is monitored by your instructor.
• You can use e-mail to ask me a question or preferably post your question on the discussion forum. I will reply on the same forum.

Online Resources

As an online student, you have access to a wealth of Web resources compiled to provide fast, easy access to information that supports your online learning experience. Organized by subjects, Online Resources link you to sites with help for writing and research, study skills, language learning, and library reference materials. All links have been assessed for credibility and reliability, and they are regularly monitored to ensure their usability.

Scope of the Course

Let me offer a few very broad generalizations about children's literature as a college-level literature course. I'm not trying to state the theme or "ultimate meaning" of this course, but rather to think for a moment about children's stories as the stuff of higher education.

In this course, you will read, familiarize yourself with, and think about a number of classic children's stories. In some cases, you will be reading stories for the first time; in others, you will be revisiting literary territory that you first encountered as a youngster. In all cases, you will be looking with adult eyes at fiction that we normally think of as the province of children.

Why is it appropriate to do this? Why should a person read children's stories (which "everyone knows are just for fun") in a context of higher education or serious intellectual inquiry? I can think of a few reasons. One is simply that all the stories you will read for this course are important in the heritage of Western civilization. They are famous stories: stories that, whether any one person has actually read them all or not, virtually everybody in our culture has heard of, knows something about, and may sometime refer to in casual conversation. Tom Sawyer, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan are probably as well-known as Hamlet, David and Goliath, and Abraham Lincoln. They form a significant part of our shifting, unofficial gallery of proverbial personages. You inspect classics of children's literature so that you will know more precisely what people are writing or talking about when they mention them. Knowing the children's classics enhances your cultural literacy.

And these stories are more than just the stories that "everyone happens to know." They are classics for good artistic reasons. Each, in its own way, is a masterpiece; they are "good literature" in that they employ important resources of the imagination in interaction with many of the real and important issues of life-concepts such as duty, freedom, work, play, fear, desire, innocence, wisdom, maturation, triumph, and defeat. Each of the children's classics has something very substantial to admire about it: qualities of style, plot, theme, and psychological insight that have made it endure and withstand the test of time.

Childhood Is Basic

These are the stories of childhood. That in itself is important, for childhood is peculiarly important. A very great deal of what we are, as individuals and as societies, is formed and rooted in childhood. To contemplate what childhood has meant, and in some respects still means, is to contemplate the foundation of human existence. The classics of children's literature are rich, complex meditations on the meaning of childhood. One of our objectives in this course will be trace and clarify some strands (not all, obviously, but some) in that rich complexity.

In this course, you will learn both to appreciate what is "right" about these classic stories and to examine what is "wrong" with them—to consider, that is, the limitations, prejudices, and biased values that went into their making. Classic children's literature tends to see life from certain privileged points of view: that of well-to-do people, white people, males, Christians, northern Europeans, and Americans. It often inculcates values that are psychologically or morally questionable, such as attitudes toward women, non-white races, authority, work, profit-taking, power, and cruelty that one cannot and should not passively accept as right. Many of the questions I will ask you to consider about the stories you will be reading are designed to clarify what might be called the darker side of children's fiction.

Does this mean that our primary task in this course will be to debunk or denounce the classics? No, it does not. Rather, the challenge will be to see what is really there: to see, first of all, what happens, and how, and to whom, and why, in these famous stories; and then to see also "what this means"—about the assumptions the authors made in conceiving their stories the way they did, about the imaginative principles on which their stories operate, and about the moral and psychological effects we might assume they have had on the millions of people who have read or heard them. In short, our perspective will be as comprehensive as we can make it. We will start with a good close knowledge of the events and characters in the stories we read, and we will think about what they say about us and our cultural orientation and life as it is lived in our world.

Organization of the Course

This course is arranged in nine lessons: one on the traditional fairy tale (you will read an assortment of the most famous); one on Hans Christian Andersen and his particular kind of "art fairy tales"; two on "boys' books," or adventure stories (Treasure Island and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer); one on the world's most famous "girls' book," Little Women; one on Alice in Wonderland; one on The Wind in the Willows; and one on Peter Pan. The final lesson will help you prepare for the final exam.

For each lesson, I will provide some introductory and background information, and I will point out certain aspects of the stories or novel for the lesson that I believe will repay close attention. I will propose questions for you to think about as you read—questions that, in my experience, can lead you into some interesting aspects of the work. At the conclusion of each lesson is a writing assignment—or, rather, two or three essay topics from which to choose.

How to Approach the Lessons

Here's what I recommend: for each lesson, begin by reading through the course guide material for that assignment, including the essay topics. Then read the introduction to the assigned story in Classics of Children's Literature. Next, as you read the story itself, keep the essay topics in mind. Underline passages that pertain to the topics, and make notes in the margin. Finally, reread the course guide, thinking more particularly this time about which topic you want to write about. Of course, as you write your essay you'll go back over the story you are writing about, reexamining sections particularly relevant to your paper.

Getting More out of What You Read

Students sometimes ask me exactly how I come up with the study questions that I ask in assignments like these; or, what is perhaps the same question put another way, how they can learn to "get more out of books" on their own, without the guidance of a "literary expert." There are at least some very general answers to that question, though none of them provides a magic formula that works itself.

Start and end with the story itself. Read it closely and attentively, imagining as fully as you can every scene and setting and description and episode. And think about what things have to do with each other—how one episode reflects on another, how one character plays off against or resembles another, how the author's tone plays over various situations while still remaining that author's tone. Any coherently conceived story will invariably show a consistent concern with certain moral or dramatic or psychological issues. Gradually you will start to sense what issues, what ideas, what kinds of situations matter most in a given story.

(Reading a story more than once, of course, helps a great deal. The extent to which it is feasible for you to do that in this course depends on how much time and energy you have to spend.)

Does Every Story Have a Moral?

Many students go into a course in children's literature assuming (perhaps without knowing it) that every children's story is designed to "teach a moral lesson." That really isn't true. If you begin reading stories as different as Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer and The Wind in the Willows assuming that they are all supposed to offer moral advice to their young readers, not only will you be disappointed, but you will probably miss a great deal of what they do offer.

If you read attentively and responsively to the authors' various viewpoints, you will not always find yourself drawn to the question "What is 'good' and what is 'bad'?" Granted, every author prefers some kinds of characters and some kinds of behavior over others, and some sense of "who is doing it right" and "who is doing it wrong" will usually emerge as you read. But the "it" that they are doing will vary greatly, and "good" and "bad" are terms not nearly exact enough to take you into the special workings of each story you'll be reading. In Treasure Island, for instance, it is obvious (and therefore not very interesting) who is "good" and who is "bad." A more telling question will be, "When does optimistic chance-taking turn into short-sighted recklessness?" In Tom Sawyer, the "bad" Tom is obviously more likable than the "good" Sid—but a question more central than their "goodness and badness" is "What are the rewards and the costs of playing to an audience?" In The Wind in the Willows, a recurring question will be, "What are the joys of living close to Nature?" You couldn't, with much profit, transfer those questions interchangeably among the three stories. Each story will dictate its own set of concerns, if you let it.

For this course, however, I will not ask that you think up questions and topics independently. Instead, I ask you to discuss the topics I have proposed for you. They are topics that I know from experience can produce quite a variety of substantial and interesting discussions.

How to Approach Your Writing Assignments

Each lesson concludes with a writing assignment. There I propose two or three topics, of which you are to choose one, for an essay of about 750 words, or about three pages, typed and double-spaced. (This is intended as a rough indication of the paper's scope; there will be no penalty if you write somewhat more or less than 750 words.) The topics are intended to draw on your own reading of the novel or stories under discussion, and on the study questions incorporated in my commentary. You are, of course, free to do secondary reading if you wish (biography of the author or published criticism or analysis of the fiction), but it is not necessary for creditable handling of the essay topics. (If you do use secondary sources for ideas in your essays, be sure to acknowledge them, either in footnotes [e.g., 1. See Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (Knopf: New York, 1976), p. 17], or by more informal reference in the body of your paper [e.g., "As Bruno Bettelheim says in The Uses of Enchantment, 'In fairy tales, a person is either good or bad, nothing in between'"].) However, I repeat: such secondary reading is not required or expected; you can satisfactorily do the writing assignments purely through your own thoughtful reactions to the story you're reading and the questions I've asked about it.

Keep the following in mind when working on your assignments:

1. When you tackle a writing assignment for this course, do not think of it as a challenge to guess what I, the instructor, would do if I were writing the paper. Take over the topic; make it your own. Look at it broadly, giving your imagination room to move in and out of it and around it. You need to find an idea about the topic that you can be interested in. When you do that, you can be sure that I, too, will find your ideas interesting and worthwhile.
2. When you write, keep the stories themselves in the foreground of your thinking. Your analysis should be deeply involved with the assigned material; resist the temptation to let your mind drift off into purely subjective and abstract thoughts about good, bad, youth, age, work, play, and so on. Our first responsibility in this course is to examine what our particular story-tellers say about such things, not what you or I may believe in our own philosophies.
3. Make your essay have a point, a clearly stated central thesis, a focus to which everything you say in the paper contributes. The old formula applies here: make clear from the outset what you consider your main point to be, provide the evidence from the story that leads you to your conclusion, and explain your reasoning. If you conscientiously do that, your essays can hardly fail to be satisfying, both to you and to me.
4. Each of your papers should be submitted to me by e-mail. (See "About the Instructor" in the course syllabus for further contact information.)
5. Please submit your essays one at a time. You will be better prepared for each assignment if you have had a chance to read and digest my comments on one essay before submitting the next. It is, however, perfectly appropriate for you to begin your reading and thinking on a lesson before receiving my comments on the preceding assignment.
6. If there are particular reasons why you feel you must submit papers more than one at a time, please contact me to explain those reasons. If this arrangement seems advisable, I will accept multiple assignments from you at the same time. Otherwise, the essays must be submitted singly.

Grading

Your grade in this course will be based on the eight short essays you submit (all weighted equally, a total of 70 percent of the course grade) and a final examination (30 percent of the course grade).

Examination

The final exam will be a two-hour, closed-book, proctored examination. It will consist of a single essay question and about 15 short-answer questions.

The essay question will ask that you spend 45 to 60 minutes writing on a topic that takes in more than one of the stories assigned. (The exam will give you two topics to choose from.) Here is an example of the sort of topic the essay question will pose:

Four of the novels assigned for this course—Treasure Island, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Little Women, and Peter Pan—end with some number of the main characters or protagonists growing up, in some respect or other. For each of those four, briefly point out evidence that someone in the story matures and leaves childhood behind. Then discuss in comparative terms what it means for characters to grow up in these stories. Do the authors seem basically to agree on the significance of crossing from childhood to adulthood? Or do they represent a range of differing ideas on that subject?

The short-answer questions will be more informational than interpretive. They can be answered in a few sentences each. Some examples: (1) Explain the idea of "bosom enemies" in Little Women and how it pertains to each of the March girls. (2) Give one example of how, in The Wind in the Willows, Rat is in tune with nature, and give one example of how Toad is not in tune with nature. (3) Name three animal bridegroom/repulsive suitor stories and indicate what theme they have in common.

Before the final examination can be scheduled, all eight short essays must have been completed, submitted, and returned to you. See lesson nine for more information on preparing for the examination.

About the Course Developer

John Griffith, Ph.D.

I am an associate professor in the University of Washington English department. I took my B.A. at the University of New Mexico in 1962 and my Ph.D. at the University of Oregon in 1969. I've been teaching at the University of Washington since then. My primary specialty is American literature, but I have been teaching children's literature since the early 1970s. I am co-editor of the text for this course, Classics of Children's Literature, and co-author of a book about children's classics, The Literary Heritage of Childhood (Greenwood Press, 1987), with Charles Frey.

I began my education in children's literature being read to as a child; I continued it as an avid bedtime-story reader to my own three children (now grown). I now have a granddaughter, to whom I read as often as I can get her to hold still for it. In virtually every phase of my life, I have found children's literature to be perhaps the most vital of all literatures, in that it forms so crucial a part of the formative process in a person's mind and imagination. And children can consume fiction with an eagerness and enthusiasm that older people only rarely achieve.

If you have particular questions or comments to address to me outside the regular format of the assignments, please e-mail me and I will do my best to respond to them. You can also leave a message on my voice mail. If you call my voice-mail number, leave a detailed message and I will get back to you as soon as possible. You can find contact information for me on the "About Your Instructor" page linked from the course syllabus.

Please introduce yourself to me by submitting the Student Information Form linked on your course syllabus page.

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