Professor: Allison Curseen
Class Time: MW 9:30-10:45
Class Room: B- Vertical Campus 10-140
Office Hours: MW 11-12 or by appointment
Office: Room 7-298
Phone: (646) 312-3936
Email: Allison.Curseen@baruch.cuny.edu
Dark Fantasies and America’s “Anxiety of Immaturity”:
An Introduction to Children’s Literature
In her seminal work Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America, Beverly Lyon Clark suggests “that women (and other) critics [artists, and cultural elites in general] suffer from an ‘anxiety of immaturity’” (6). Notwithstanding the importance of Clark’s impressive tracing of large-scale trends in America’s historical reception of children’s literature and her careful detailing of tensions between intellectual elites, guardians of middle class norms, and popular tastes, this idea of an American “anxiety of immaturity” might be Clark’s most salient and generative offering. Clark however does not provide an explanation of this phrase nor does she offer any historical contextualization that might help us understand why and from where this anxiety grows in American culture. In this course—designed to introduce students to the rich and often over-simplified history of children’s literature in an American context—we will endeavor to engage this minor but significant thread in Clark’s argument. Students will be asked to 1) question (racial, gender, class, and moral) assumptions about children; 2) interrogate investments in the categories “childhood” and “adulthood” in a young country founded on the idea that it had come-of-age and into independence from a mother (old) country; and 3) probe the relationship between those assumptions/investments and America’s anxieties about notions of childishness and immaturity as they show up elsewhere in women, racial others, differently-abled, activism, and artistic practices.
We will read a variety of classic and not so-classic works that have come to be regarded as (if not originally written as) literature for children. This is not a course on “the history of childhood,” nor is it a course aimed solely at future educators, although students interested in either or both of these fields are most welcome. Rather, this course will trace a history of children in literature and literature regarded as “for children” in America. Questions we will explore include but are not limited to: How do children in literature and the literature for children (both of which were/are read by child and adult readers) help shape and challenge the nation’s imagining of independence, progress, gender, race, and the other? How have expressions of immaturity and childishness both animated an American dream while also serving as the foil against which America and Americans have defined themselves? To what ends has the consistently blurry and shifting lines between adult and child worlds been policed? And how has America’s particular history of slavery and relation to blackness and black bodies mitigated (if not also been the source of) the ongoing tensions between fantasy and instruction in children’s literature in America?
*Baum, Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. 100th Anniversary Edition (Book of Wonder). Harper Collins. 2000.
*Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Ed. Donald J. Gray. Norton Critical Edition (3rd) 2013.
Hughes, Langston. Dream-Keepers and Other Poems. Knopf Books for Young Readers. 1996.
Rey, H.A. and Margaret. The Complete Adventures of Curious George. 70th Anniversary Edition.. HMH Books for Young Readers. 2010.
Sendak, Maurice. Where the Wild Things Are. HarperCollins. 2012.
*Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Ed. Beverly Lyon-Clark. Norton Critical Edition. 2006.
Recommended
Avery, Gillian. Behold the American Child and Their Books. RH Canada UK Dist. 1994
*Bannerman, Helen. The Story of Little Black Sambo. HarperCollins. 1922
Lyon-Clark, Beverly. Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America. John Hopkins UP. 2004
[Additional readings will be posted on blackboard]
*Note: Readings marked with * are out of copyright, which means that you can find a free version online or for Kindle. Please note: when looking for a free version, make sure that you get original text and illustration. Sometimes children’s classics are reproduced in summarized version (e.g. there are tons of reduced/retold versions of Tom Sawyer’s adventures). All books including the recommended-but-not-required texts are available in the bookstore. Any articles/excerpts text will be available on Blackboard.