Purposeful Writing

            After contemplating all of the readings from this semester so far I have found interesting the broad range of purpose behind each text. The readings from the beginning of the semester to the middle seemed to been very didactic in nature and somewhat one-dimensional. After some further scrutiny I have found that that was not always the case. The fairy tales were all very moralistic and usually had a harsh lesson for children to learn. There could be multiple readings of the fairy tales but such as the case in Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel the lessons to be taught were by instilling fear into the child. After the fairy tales we had some readings that were either moralistic or didactic from the Christian point of view.  The hornbooks and some of the ABC books had Christian notions built right into them. After we read some about some of the different concepts of the child we finally got around to what I think was the first modern piece of literature in our Class; Kim. Kim also comes across as the most ambiguous of the readings as far as what the author’s purpose may be. Although a case can be made for Kipling representing being an imperialist sympathizer, I would not say that that was an explicit purpose for this story. And I don’t think that Kipling was trying to advocate one religion or culture as superior than the other but I do think he may have had a slight cultural bias that he just couldn’t shake in the writing of Kim. The next two texts, Little house on the Prairie and The Birchbark House, were interesting because they represented different cultures point of view during the frontier period in America. The last two books that we have read, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Golden Compass seem so similar but at the same time opposites. C. S. Lewis’ book is a Christian advocate while Pullman’s Golden Compass has an anti organized religion slant to it. I have found it very interesting so far that much of the purpose behind the creating all of the texts we have read is to instill some sort of ideal or lesson that the adult writers feel they must convey onto children. Sometimes the writes seem to feel like they have to correct a wrong of a past author by writing a story from their own point of view. 

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

            I must say that I was rather leery about reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. What little I did know about Chronicles of Narnia before reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe led me to believe that this was not the type of novel that I would have been interested in as a child. As a kid most of the books I read were not set in fantasy worlds. I think that James’ peach in James and the Giant Peach was about the strangest place a novel took me when I was a kid. I generally stuck with books based in reality, as I knew it. I guess I like to stick with the familiar as far as settings go. Also, knowing that C.S. Lewis was a Christian writer was a turn off. I just don’t like the idea of using thinly veiled Christian themes in children’s novels. It seems like trickery to me and that’s not very honest.

            Once I started reading TLTWATW found that I wasn’t as uncomfortable as I thought I was going to be. I must say that I was thoroughly entertained. Although I knew that there is a christen theme that runs through the novel I found it very interesting that Lewis also used some mythological creatures such as centaurs, giants and Pan as Mr. Tumnus.  Along with the characters from mythologies Lewis anthropomorphized many animals such as the obvious Lion. The wolves were the bad guys like in most children’s stories that have wolves. I thought the fish got the short end of the stick as far as not getting any human characteristics. It made me wonder how Lewis decided what animals were special and which were not special enough to get human characteristics. 

            I find it interesting that Lewis brought together these different elements to create an appropriate book for Christian boys and girls(although I could see some of their parents not agreeing with that.) There are lessons to be learned in this story for children of all beliefs. I think that sometimes we can reject a work or an idea because it comes from a certain source or belief system when in fact the lesson to be learned from that work is universal. 

The Cat in the App

            After reading Lois Menand’s, article  “Cat People” I started thinking about the culture in which Dr. Suess wrote his books. I had had some knowledge about him as an author but not very much. I knew that he was a critic of war and that his books were or are considered controversial as far as using them in educational settings. I also found it interesting in the article how the education system was being funded at the time and how this may have contributed to the success of the book and the author in general. The new funding for the subjects that support the sciences which lead to technology lead to the success of not only Dr. Suess but in children’s education. This is interesting because those subjects were funded due to the cold war and the belief that America was falling behind in the arms race.

            Now bear with me and let me jump ahead to 2012. I forgot my copy of The Cat in the Hat somewhere so I had to download it onto my phone. The app version is the same in some ways yet very different in the way it can be read. The app version can be read just like any other e-book can but there are new features that make it a more interactive experience. The app will read the book to you if you want. There is music playing in the background. After you are done listening to the reader you can touch the various objects in the illustration and the device tells you what you are touching. This was such a new experience for me and I don’t even think I have explored all of the features of the app yet. Now how are these two things connected? Well part of Dr. Suess’s success was the timing of his publishing of his book. If it were not for the funding of the sciences at the time who knows if we would even have the technology to have the device in which I read The Cat in the Hat on. The technology behind cell phones stems from technology developed for the military. Dr. Suess was not a fan of the military. I found this all to be rather ironic. 

Harriet the Spy

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh was quite different to me than the past two novels that we have had to read for children’s literature. The books The Birchbark House and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry both have protagonists that have to deal with rather serious problems in their lives. Omakays from BBH helps her family with their daily life and eventually helps most of her family survive a smallpox epidemic. In her daily routine Omakayas’ chores are not just busy work but provide essential things such as hides for clothing or food for the family. Cassie must learn the harsh lessons of racial bigotry and struggles to reconcile with the status quo in RoT.  Although her family is landowners they are still very poor and struggle to pay bills, which is a crucial part of the plot. Harriet on the other hand does not really have any serious issues to deal within her life. Her family appears to be at least upper middle class and everything she needs is provided for. She has a nursemaid and the household has a family cook who begrudgingly makes Harriet her favorite sandwich for lunch everyday.

In the BBH and RoT neither Omakayas nor Cassie create their own problems. Both of their concerns are come from external forces that they could never had control over in the first place. Omakays and Cassie did not create disease, colonialism or racism. Abd those are some pretty issues to deal with as children. Harriet on the other hand created her own problem and the problem is not even that serious. As I was reading HtS I had no empathy for her situation whatsoever as I did with Cassie and Logan. I felt that she was just a spoiled brat who got herself into trouble by writing mean things about the people around her. I’m not going to feel bad for a gossip getting caught. The ending somewhat surprised me in that the big lesson for her to learn was empathy but it was too anti-climactic.

One thing I did like about Harriet the Spy was the character of Ole Golly. My toes hurt with joy from her quote dropping. 

Roll of Thunder

Man, things just got real in children’s literature. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor was for me the most realistic reading that I have had so far in class. The setting for this book is more familiar to me than the settings in Little House on the Prairie and The Birchbark House. I found it interesting that even though those two novels took place over half a century before Roll of Thunder. A running theme of all of the novels I have read for class so far seems to be the education of the children characters in the books. In Kim, the reader is taken along with Kim in his education in Imperial India. This would not have been interesting except that Kim is culturally more Indian than he is Irish. In The Birchbark House Omakayas goes through some very emotional tests and finds her calling as a medicine women.

In Rolling Thunder, which is told from the point of view of 9 year old Cassie Logan, the importance of education runs through on a couple of levels. The novel starts out with the Logan children walking to their first day off school. Mrs. Logan is a teacher and the Logan children all have the importance of education instilled upon them all the time. This theme is also reinforced in the small story about how Mrs. Logan’s father scrimped and saved every penny to make sure his daughter could get an education and pass along knowledge to others.  But there were many more lessons to be learned in this book than just to go to school.

I found it very interesting that Taylor did not gloss over the harsh realities of race relations that African Americans had to deal with at the time. This was the most realistic part of the novel for me. The scenes with Jeremy were probably the most painful for me to read. He seemed like just a good, kindhearted sweet boy but could only be so close to the Logan children just because of ‘the way things are’. The instances of what should have been and fairness and the realities that existed were very harsh for children to deal with let alone adults. Cassie’s incident in town is an example of this. Sometimes I think that we as a country have come very far from the way things were in the setting 

The Birchbark House again.

   After taking another look at The Birchbark House and the Elizabeth Gargano article about the cyclical nature of the book I began to think about how most oks that we read are n of this nature. The traditional form of the novel, as we know, it tends to have a linear timeline. It has a beginning middle and an end.  This form is very tidy and what we have come to expect as readers. Erdrich’s novel has some of the same elements as the traditional novel but she interjects some Native American formatting to it. It is basically the story of a young girls experience over a one-year period. I see this book as a Bildungsroman. Omakayas is the girl who the novel revolves around. Erdrich uses the four seasons to create four parts to the book and each part contains traditional chapters. The four seasons approach, although I see it as somewhat cliché, is leaning toward the Ojibwa culture. The chapters are a more traditional western written style. The traditional chapters probably make the book more navigable for the audience who Erdrich is trying to reach. I have not seen or read any of her adult material but I think she would able to incorporate a more true representation of Ojibwa culture and their story telling techniques. I thought how she worked all of the cycles into The Birchbark Tree was a good introduction to how Native Americans told stories. If I hadn’t read the article by Gargano I don’t think that I would have picked up on the importance of all the different story circles that take place in the novel.  There are circles within circles within circles.  I am not an author myself but I wonder how much of a struggle it is for a writer like Erdrich to try to write a novel that keeps the integrity of the culture she is trying to represent using a form that was/is foreign to that culture.