Author Archives: Raymond Urrutia

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Inanimate Objects and their Significant Role in Our Imagination’s

We talked a bit last week about how Little Black Sambo seemed to have this “familiarity” to it and I feel the same can be said for The Pasteboard Bandit. As I was reading I found myself remembering the book (but honestly, mostly its movie adaptation) The Indian in the Cupboard, and how its central fantastical theme was this idea of bringing inanimate objects to life. In psychology there’s this term known as “animalistic thinking”, which denotes that children within a certain age frame believe that inanimate objects are real. This theme is rampant when it comes to children’s entertainment, especially when we consider television and movies (Barney, Toy Story). We can reach a little further with this idea when it comes to myths and legends. When we are told as children that Santa Claus exists and that the Boogieman lives under our bed, we, as children, are quick to believe it, even with no proof. This resonated with me as I read “The Land Behind The Sun” within The Brownies Book, and remembering my irrational fear of something living in my closet just because my older cousin told me it did.

Obviously, as we get older we realize the folly of our thought processes as children, but we never forget what it was like to believe outlandish and fantastical ideas. I honestly believe that if this was not the case, that literature and entertainment of the more ‘imaginative” sort would not be possible. Having moments in life in which you believe the impossible is possible, whether it’s believing that the tooth fairy exists or that your dolls or figures are real, is a requirement to having, let alone developing, an imagination.

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My Qualms with “Why Are American’s Afraid of Dragons?”

I sit here looking to add substance to my blog about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by reading Ursula LeGuin’s “Why are American’s Afraid of Dragons”, but find myself basically snubbed by her assumptions within the essay and am now more inclined to talk about that than anything else. I took this class because by plan is to someday write for children’s television shows someday, so taking a children’s literature course was kind of obvious. However, I never developed my love for writing from books (in fact I really don’t like to read at all), instead it came from television. To this day I’d rather see the new episode of Once Upon a Time on ABC, rather than watch the Jets lost another game during the football season. I’ve read graphic novels and comics since I was a kid and was never into many sports, westerns or detective stories (unless it involved Batman). What I’m getting at here is that I basically live in my imagination, and for someone who is now working toward developing it further in hopes of making a living using it, I find myself somewhat perplexed and vexed by Ursula’s thinking.

She grounds our forsaking of imagination in our assimilated roles within our genders and uses bases like the needs and gains of our financial responsibilities and attainments as a way of supporting this. However, this was done in 1974, so I would hope that our development and use of technology in the genres of film and television have enabled the general American populace to embrace and strengthen both our own, and opinions about, imagination. Now thinking about it, I just read the entirety of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz online from a miniature tablet, which would not have even been imagined to exist 10 years ago, let alone 38 years ago! Our development of things such as C.G.I and digital libraries have allowed us to push and fulfill our imaginations passed the stars and into the beyond, with no current end in sight. This essay might have made some sense then, but it makes a lot less sense now.

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Humor Reached through Nonsense and Realized through Common Sense

My reading of both the New Wave Nonsense chapter within Humor in Contemporary Junior Literature and Alice in Wonderland helped me both better understand and enjoy this concept of using nonsense as a form of literary humor. The chapter had a lot of interesting divisions of nonsense that involve language, double-meaning, gross-out humor and context, but the exerts within the New Wave Nonsense chapter about nonsense being used as humor through the use (or rather lack) of logic was particularly funny to me. This is particularly true in Alice in Wonderland, as Wonderland’s inhabitants use almost all of these types of nonsense humor, but it’s when they go against logic, and both Alice and I (the reader) must really dial into their words in an effort make sense of it, that I end up smirking the most.

The interrogation scene within Alice in Wonderland where the king analysis’s the found note, while he tries to find the Knave of Hearts guilty for stealing the Queen’s tart’s was particularly funny, due to its use of literal language and disregard for logic. When he reads the part about the letter mentioning that its writer cannot swim, and then links this automatically to the Knave of Hearts (the Knave reminds him that he cannot swim because he is made out of cardboard) was particularly enjoyable. Additionally, when Alice reminds him of the part where it acknowledges that the letter says that nothing was taken in the first place, and the king’s sudden triumphant exclamation of this fact by pointing at the plate of tarts within the courtroom as if he had found them himself, added additional humor to this scene. It took me a moment to find the humor in it, because I had to analysis the situation and figure out both exactly what was said and how it supposedly makes sense to the character. I often found myself rereading the songs, poems and statements of most of the inhabitants in Wonderland, in hopes of doing something similar and this often ended with me understanding why it was funny. Interestingly though, when they made absolutely no sense (even with my use of common sense to understand it) it was still funny because of the absolute lunacy and needlessness of it being said in the first place (an example is the Hatter’s telling of a riddle and then him not knowing the answer to it when finally asked for it).

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My Niece’s Ramble…My Learning Through Experimentation

My reading of Little Annie’s Ramble, managed to reinforce the epiphany I had while I was reading The Case against Peter Pan, two weeks ago; although not without a little extra experimentation on my part. While reading Little Annie’s Ramble on my iPad I happened to be doing it right next to my eleven year old niece (while she was also doing something on her iPad). After finishing and reflecting on how much this story happened to resonate with this idea that not all children’s literature is for children, which I had gotten from my reading the first couple sentences of The Case against Peter Pan, I decided to try something. I asked my niece if she would like to see what type of stuff College kids have to read and she said yes. I then showed her the entire text of Little Annie’s Ramble and she was (understandably) a bit taken aback with it. I then told her to try and read the first paragraph with me and, through a bit of egging on, she said she’d try. She struggled, but with my help she finished it. I then asked her what she thought about it and she said she didn’t understand any of it. I then read to her parts of the text out loud (mainly the parts describing the candy shop and toy store). I made sure to enunciate certain words like sugar, sweetly, cakes and doll and (after I finished each exert) when I asked her what I was describing she answered (although clearly uncertain in her facial expressions) “candy” and “toys”, respectively.

Although all I was really doing was killing time before Sons of Anarchy started, my experiment on my niece gave me a bit more understanding in the context of children. I knew for a fact that this text was not meant for children and I proved that by making her read the text to me out loud and asking her if she understood it (which she did not). At the same time though, when I read it to her (while making sure I enunciated certain words I knew she’d know) she managed to get a general idea of what I was talking about. Through this nonchalant experiment I’ve come to an interesting understanding in my abovementioned epiphany: even if specific stories about children are not meant for children there is still always something there for children, even if they themselves don’t know it is there.

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Reflection and Child Appropriateness through Peter Pan, the Black Plague and the Teletubbies.

Although this week’s texts were a bit too scholarly for my taste, they each had their own valid point of which I took to better understanding the concept of what is children’s literature. Kiddie Lit let me think about this concept of what is considered “childish,” and roused my understanding of our use of it, and other comparable words (kiddie, child, boy, girl), as a derogatory context within our language. The Little People essay reminded me that our view of what a child is, in the context of what we now-a-days, within the American culture, socially consider a child, has not always been the case; due in part to both the changing times and the multitude of diverse cultures. The Case against Peter Pan essay (in its first couple of sentences alone) gave me a major epiphany; that not all children’s literature is specifically aimed at stimulating children, and that sometimes adults get much more out of these stories then a child ever could. This epiphany I had was then backed up by the How to Read Children’s Literature text; mainly in its explanation of what an “implied reader” was and its explanation on how a text is meant to grab a specific type of reader. It also reminded me that everyone gets something different then everyone else when reading a genre as specific as children’s literature.

This cadre of confusion brought upon by these four texts has me rethinking not only what is children’s literature, but what is child appropriate in general. However, I know that this institution of child appropriateness is run by adults and is both subject to, and victim to, adult allusions. How many people know that the story of Peter Pan was originally a story within a story about an older man and his connection with a boy who is not his son (not implying anything, but acknowledging its “iffy-ness”)? More importantly, if more people did know about its origin, would that change Peter Pan’s widely accepted child centric draw on a socially acceptable level? There’s also the famous nursery rhyme “Ring around the Rosie,” whose rhymes have been believed to allude to the symptoms of the Black Plague, which is definitely not a child appropriate subject. However, this nursery rhyme is still sung by adults to children and children themselves, all over the world, and very few people have ever not heard of or know it. There’s also the famous incident over the purple Teletubby and this dumb idea that the character represented the gay community. No child, of whom the Teletubbies was specifically made for, would ever distinguish this allusion, let alone care (even if it was true).