Elly McCausland ‘ "A favourite in most school-rooms": adapting the Arthurian legend for the pedagogical canon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.’

This term I am delighted to welcome Elly McCausland from the University of York to CLOC. Elly’s talk will take place on Friday November 21^st at 4pm.

 ‘ "A favourite in most school-rooms": adapting the Arthurian legend for the pedagogical canon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.’

In 1888, scholar and lecturer Frederick Ryland wrote in the English Illustrated Magazine that Malory’s Morte Darthur is ‘one of the many books whose fate is to be more talked about than read’. Yet during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries we find numerous adaptations of Malory’s text published in editions designed specifically for use in schoolrooms, and by 1921 the influential Newbolt Report on the Teaching of English in England listed the Arthurian legend as the third most popular book for classroom instruction in English. This paper will explore how Malory’s inclusion in the pedagogical canon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries parallels significant developments in the establishment of English Literature as an academic discipline. I will argue that Malory’s text was co-opted as part of a wider academic movement, in conjunction with liberal humanist notions of education, which emphasised the potential of English Literature to inculcate values relating to nationalism, heritage, and ethical self-development, and examine the methods whereby the Morte was repackaged in children’s school editions to deliver these lessons.

Tea and coffee will be served after the talk. 

St Cross Room, St Cross College, OX1 3LZ

RSVP cara dot bartels-bland at stx dot ox dot ac dot uk.

David Whitley ‘ “We’ll eat you up we love you so”: Children, Animals and the Poetics of the Food Chain’

For our second talk this term I am delighted to welcome David Whitley from the University of Cambridge to CLOC. David will be speaking on Friday May 30th, 4pm. 

‘ “We’ll eat you up we love you so”: Children, Animals and the Poetics of the Food Chain.’

As has often been observed, food tends to play a disproportionately significant role within children’s literature. Food has often been considered in terms of its psychological and social functions, within narratives for younger readers particularly. Yet we rarely consider the implications of how imagery of eating in children’s literature also relates to our position as human beings within the food chain as a whole. In many well-known and highly influential instances, the question of who eats what (or who eats whom, since animals are so often personalised) is of very considerable dramatic significance. But, in this talk, I will ask whether, beyond their dramatic import, such instances also raise questions about how we position ourselves as human beings and what children may be learning from the wider contexts of the stories we tell them. I suggest that the imagery of creatures eating each other - with which we ‘feed’ our children - both rehearses and masks fundamental anxieties about where we stand in the natural order. Drawing on examples from a wide variety of different modes – fiction, film, picture books and poetry – I also pose some interesting formal questions about the poetics of the predatory instinct in children’s literature.

Tea and coffee will be served after the talk. 

St Cross Room, St Cross College, OX1 3LZ

RSVP cara dot bartels-bland at stx dot ox dot ac dot uk.

Janice Bland 'Story as patterned cognitive play explored in Brian Selznick’s graphic narrative: "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" '

This term I am delighted to welcome Dr Janice Bland from the University of Vechta (Germany) to CLOC. Janice will be speaking on Friday May 16th, 4pm.

Story as patterned cognitive play explored in Brian Selznick’s graphic narrative:

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

‘A work of art acts like a playground for the mind, a swing or slide or a merry-go-round of visual or aural or social pattern’ (Boyd 2009).

This paper will suggest that The Invention of Hugo Cabret demonstrates how art, in this case a new kind of graphic narrative, can generate confidence – confidence that the reader/viewer can make changes and actually modify life events through craft and creativity. The emphasis will be on the woven and intertextual nature of storytelling, as realised for example in silent movies and The Invention of Hugo Cabret. I will illustrate how story can simulate the multimodal nature of experience and creatively rework it to engender new options – as a dress rehearsal for the future (Cron 2012).

Tea and coffee will be served after the talk.
St Cross Room, St Cross College, St Giles, OX1 3LZ

RSVP cara dot bartels-bland at stx dot ox dot ac dot uk.

Karín Lesnik-Oberstein ‘Children’s Literature, Literature and Neuroscience: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’

This term I am delighted to welcome Prof Karín Lesnik-Oberstein from the University of Reading to CLOC. Karín will be speaking on Friday February 7^th, 4pm. Her talk is entitled ‘Children’s Literature, Literature and Neuroscience: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’ and she will discuss a range of critical and scientific papers on neuroscience and children’s literature, including sections from the original scientific papers on ‘mirror neurons’ by Rizzolatti et al, from papers on ideas of child language development and evolutionary psychology by David S. Miall and Ellen Dissanayake and by Jonathan Gottschall, and sections of children’s literature criticism. 

Tea and Coffee will be served after the talk.
St Cross Room, St Cross College, St Giles, OX1 3LZ 


RSVP cara dot bartels-bland at stx dot ox dot ac dot uk

Hilary 2014 Term Card: Children’s Literature and Neuroscience

Friday Feb 7^th, 4pm: Prof Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (University of Reading) ‘Children’s Literature, Literature and Neuroscience: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’

St Cross Room, St Cross College, St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LZ

Please RSVP cara dot bartels-bland at stx dot ox dot ac dot uk to attend.

Jenny Bavidge, 'Natural Causes: Urban Nature and Children's Literature’

We are delighted to have Jenny Bavidge (Cambridge) speak at our next seminar. Her talk is entitled  'Natural Causes: Urban Nature and Children's Literature’ and will take place at St Cross College on Friday 22 Nov. at 4pm.

Jenny will be talking about New York City and Central Park stories, and on motifs of childhood in texts about urban nature such as Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts.

Please RSVP cara dot bartels-bland at stx dot ox dot ac dot uk to attend.